nimana ji,
You are right that I didn't want to discuss this (and also, it isn't really the topic of the thread), but since you spoke a bit more kindly than some others, here's what I have to say:
The thing that you overlooked about Zafarnama is that the letters that are supposed to be pronounced differently from the Punjabi phonemes are marked with, for lack of a better term, accent marks. Go check it out for yourself. To me, that just gives more proof that we shouldn't be changing those letters when the accents marks aren't there. Even in the Sirlekh, you'll see that the ਜ in Zafarnama has an accent mark, but the ਸ in Patisaahi doesn't, because as a convention in all of Dasam Granth, Patisaahi is used in Sirlekhs, not Patashaahi with that 'sh' phoneme.
In the same handwritten Saroops, you can go back to the beginning and see that in Jaap Safhib that Panktis such as ।ਕਿਜਾਹਰਜਹੂਰਹੈਂ॥ਕਿਹਾਜਰਹਜੂਰਹੈਂ। do not have accent marks, so we should not be pronouncing the ਜs in those lines as 'z', but as 'j'. You can go to Chaupai Sahib and see that words such as ਸਰਨ, ਦੁਸਟ, ਦ੍ਰਿਸਟਿ, etc, do not have accent marks either, so they shouldn't be pronounced with the 'sh' phoneme, but the 's' phoneme.
I personally am not really big on telling people that things should be a certain way, which is why when it came to the RamkaliKiVaar, I made sure to say that people may differ in opinion (see the response to Preetraj ji's question why it isn't mentioned in the Rehat Maryada). Anyways, to me these accent marks are clear proof that we shouldn't be modifying letters to what we consider is correct. Also, note that when talking about these modified letters, I never referred to them as letters with bindis added (we only started adding bindis to signal these phoneme changes later on; but before then, there was already a mark to signal these).
One thing that must be considered is that languages change. The Punjabi we speak today is not the same as the Punjabi that was spoken 300 years ago. Also, when languages borrow words from other languages, they almost always seem to change the pronunciation. You'll notice that English doesn't generally use the phonemes for ਕ, ਚ, ਟ, ਤ, or ਪ at the beginning of words so when they use words from languages that do, they end up using ਖ, ਛ, ਠ, ਥ, and ਫ instead (and by ਫ, don't mean 'f', but an aspirated 'p'; to see the difference compare the 'p' in "pin" vs "spin"), and we do the opposite when we use English words (for the most part). To see this in action, just see how we end up saying the following words in Punjabi: car, chocolate, taco, pizza, and party. Also, see how we (or non-Punjabi speakers) say these words in English: ਕਿਰਪਾਨ, ਚੰਦ੍ਰ, ਟੋਕਰੀ, ਤਾਲ, and ਪੰਡਿਤ. Another interesting one is to see how Hawaiians say "Merry Christmas" (see here: [
www.youtube.com]).
Considering that all of this happens, why is it so hard to believe that Gurbani uses Persian words, but doesn't keep the Persian pronunciations of the words (not referring to Zafarnama here, since as before I explained that it does use Persian pronunciation)? In Dasam Granth, there is even an instance where the word 'near' is used and is written as 'ਨੀਅਰ', when the actual English pronunciation is closer to ਨੀਉਰ than it is to ਨੀਅਰ (but both of those aren't exactly right since English's 'r' differs from Gurmukhi's 'ਰ'). This is another example of how words from other languages can be used without pronouncing them exactly how they are in the original language.
Anyways, the main point is that the argument a words in Gurbani such as ਪਾਤਿਸਾਹ (for example), should be pronounced 'Patashaa' rather than 'Patisaah' isn't too convincing for two reasons. Firstly, old handwritten Saroops using the aforementioned accent mark to signal phoneme changes such as this; and secondly because though we may agree that the word originates from Farsi, that doesn't mean that the original language's pronunciation is the one that Gurbani uses. Not to even mention how words within just one language tend to change over time.
I would also like to say that Harinder Singh (SikhRI), Jaswant Singh, and Surendar Pal Singh bring up a very good point in their book "Gurū Granth Sāhib: Its Language & Grammar", which I will quote here:
"While the modern Gurmukhī has come to incorporate the character ਸ਼ as a representative of the "sh" phone, this character was available in premodern South Asia. For example, the Devnāgarī script carried two comparable alternatives for the "sh" phone (श, ष) and the Perso-Arabic script incorporated a character known as shīn for this sound value as well. Due to the availability of "sh" phone in other scripts and its absence in the earliest forms of Gurmukhī, it seems reasonable to surmise that these phones were either not pronounced, or less pronounced within the particular historical and regional context of the Gurū Granth Sāhib's compilation." (Page 22)
When it comes to the comments about 'c' being pronounced as both 's' and 'k', I just want to say that English is not a good role model for scripts, and I think that the script compiled by Guru Angad Dev would be the best system we have for representing Gurbani in writing; we shouldn't need to use the IPA to accurately write down how Gurbani is supposed to be pronounced (we could but we shouldn't have to). I admit that some letters do have different sounds, those letters being in the fourth column of the Gurmukhi script's chart (ਘ, ਝ, ਢ, ਧ, and ਭ), but their pronunciation depends on their position in the word (as you will note even when saying the name of these letters), which is why we can accurately pronounce them. This is not the case for the letters ਸ, ਖ, ਗ, ਜ, ਫ, ਲ, and ਕ, which some tend to say are dual sound letters. If that was the case, we would need to use something like the IPA to accurately represent them in writing.
There are probably many mistakes I've made since I didn't go back and double-check my post entirely, so please forgive me for any mistakes. I am only bringing up what I believe and the reasons why. I request everyone to not see this as an attack on what they believe (sorry again Bhagauti ji), because that is not what it is intended to be. I'm not saying that I am right about everything; I am just saying that these arguments should be taken into consideration as well when discussing pronunciation of Gurbani.
Lastly, I'd like to leave you with these videos of how old languages sounded like (pay extra attention to English) and you can decide for yourself how much languages can change over time (especially since in Gurmukhi, we are only talking about very small changes, such as some phonemes being added, nasal sounds becoming more prominent, etc):
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Not only are have there been changes in languages in the past (like how American English and British English diverged), but there are even changes happening in languages today. For one example, you can look up the cot-caught merger, or watch this video:
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Bhul-chuk Maaf Karni