ศาลาชุมนุม

[lumdam]

Out of curiosity, I looked for words with sara อุ or อู combined with ฐ/ญ/ฎ/ฏ. I found only one such word in this site's dictionary: กตัญญู, which happens to have a similar synonym *and* an alternate spelling! ha!

The RID definition of กุฏิ contains "{cf. Tamil: กูฏุ = รังนก}".

Are there more such words? Are they rare simply because the consonants are, or are these combinations specifically avoided by using another consonant?

[Richard Wordingham]

From Doug Cooper's word list:

ฏุณฐุก
ทุฏฐุลละ

กตัญญุตา
กตัญญู
กาลัญญุตา
กาลัญญู
ปริสัญญู
รัตตัญญู
วทัญญุตา
วทัญญู
วรัญญู
วิญญู
สัพพัญญู
อกตัญญุตา
อกตัญญู
อวิญญู

กฏุก
ฏุณฐุก (again)
เลษฏุ
วฏุมะ

กฎุมพี / กระฎุมพี (only latter in RID)

Not only are ฐ ฏ ฎ rare, but /u/ and /u:/ are relatively infrequent vowels. Also, ญ is rare before a vowel, and generally derives from cluster, either -ny- or jn-. Before a vowel, the primary source of these words is Pali or Sanskirt, so ฐ ฏ ฎ before vowels are unlikely to be changed, as Sanskritisation will not change them. While -ญญ- might be Sanskritised to -นย-, that seems fairly infrequent. On the other hand, native หญ- has mostly been changed to หย- and native ญ- entirely to ย-. While there may be more, the only relevant example of these I can dig out is ยุง.

[lumdam]

Nice, thanks for the info.