Upon listening to paritta chanting, I got the impression that monks actually pronounce heavy syllables “long by position” with a long vowel and simplify the following geminate (but pronounce it with greater tension?). For example, the verse from the Rattanasutta “ye suppayuttā manasā daḷhena, nikkāmino…” I heard pronounced as “ye sūpayūtā manasā daḷhena, nīkāmino…”. In Czech, my native language, vowel length is phonemic, so I don’t think I would mishear it, but of course I could be wrong.
Some of the chanting that I have heard from western monastics in the Thai forest lineage can sound like that. They tend to miss the double consonant. Such as the p and t in sup.pa.yut.tā It seems that some chanting styles will extend the vowel length before the double consonant, but this shouldn’t be done at the expense of the consonants. See the variety of styles of Sri Lankan chanting.
There are apparently also quirks due to the Thai tonal system. Though, I don’t speak Thai, so I can’t speak to those variations.
Burmese chanting is a whole other thing!
In English we aren’t used to pronouncing double consonant so it’s a common fault.
Adding to the above, this is from Bhante Gunaratana’s chanting book Bhāvanā Vandanā
Meter
Pāli is pronounced with a rhythm of short and long syllables. Short syllables are held for half the time that long syllables are held. Generally, the length of a syllable is determined by the vowel. Long vowels are: ā, e, ī, o, and ū. Short vowels are: a, i and u.
However, when a short vowel (a i or u) is followed by two or more consonants, the syllable is pronounced long. Thus, “Buddha” is spoken as a long syllable followed by a short one:
— •
Bud-dha
When a short vowel (a i or u) is followed by the nasal sound ṃ the syllable is pronounced
long. The nasal word ending is sometimes pronounced short, for example in poetry or
certain common phrases. This is indicated by a normal m.
Yeah, this is a common misunderstanding of the double consonants. The syllable preceding should become long in time by giving the consonant a half beat not by changing the quality of the vowel.
Thai does have short and long vowels and so should make a distinction between u and ū for example, but with tones and timing doing most of the work to disambiguate short and long vowels in Thai, the distinction in quality between u and ū etc is basically lost on most Thais. This then collides with the Anglophone ear of monks like me because English has quality distinctions between short and long vowels but mostly doesn’t have tones or vowel lengths or double (stop) consonants. So an English native speaker learning the chanting by ear from Thai chanters is quite likely to miss the stop consonants and pick up just the overall rhythm, leading to the effect you noticed.
