To be honest, I have only ever heard Americans pronounce OM to rhyme with Home. In the rest of the world, and in India, Om is pronounced to rhyme with From, Gone or One. There is a kind of drawn out version of the mantra where it takes like 10 seconds to chant it (often done in ashrams in India) and there does seem to be three sylables involved. These would be a bit like O (as in Orange), a letter that I can only describe as a cross between O and W, with a slight nasal effect, and then M (as in Mother). The middle one is quite easy as it happens as the mouth is closed slowly between O (as in Orange) and M (as in Mother).
Does that help ?
I have started experimenting with this mantra and will report if anything exciting comes up.
Christi
Yes, that’s helpful. You’re starting by forcing me to be more accurate, which is a good start…
Christi said:
To be honest, I have only ever heard Americans pronounce OM to rhyme with Home.
Yes, I was little afraid you’d say that, because I was simplifying a bit. In standard English, the OM in home is a diphtong, like o followed by what I believe is a short ‘oo’ before the m. Native English speakers are generally quite unconscious that this O (generally before any M in English I think) is not flat and pure. If you want to get a flatter O followed by M, take the ‘oa’ or ‘oar’ and substitute an ‘m’ for the r, without changing the sound of the ‘oa’ to accommodate the ‘m’, you’ll get something much closer to what I ‘meant’ (sigh) by OM/home. (If you read it like OAM there is a chance you’ll pronounce it like ‘loam’ without the ‘l’ and we are back where we started.)
I’m glad though that you have an eye for this detail. To say OM/home seems bad now, so maybe I should say OM/oar just as if the O sould is purer like in ‘oar’. So what’s really going on is that we seem to have two very different sounds for OM-the-symbol; OM/oar and AUM/OWM. There are probably a lot of variants of both (what you said seems to confirm this), and some of the variations of the sounds for OM-the-symbol don’t seem to fall even close to either camp.
This OM/oar is what I’ve been hearing from tapes I got years ago (in my callow yogic youth) from SRF. I remember ‘OM guru OM guru …’ etc, and it was this flat-O OM, OM/oar. Not AUM/owm.
One other carification just to be sure: when I say AUM is a sound like English ‘owm’ (not a real English word) I mean the ‘ow’ to be like the ‘ow’ in ‘clown’. Not like the ‘ow’ in that unusually-spelt word, ‘own’, as in ‘my own’.
So, after some corrections, I think I’m still on a right track: from my analysis anyway, AUM/owm seems to be what OM-the-symbol is indicating above (if it has been analyzed properly), and it seems to be the analysis of AUM given by the Mandukya Upanishad. In other words, more like English ‘owm’.
In other words, if the Mandukya Upanishad is correct, this mantra-of-all-mantras is AUM/‘owm’, not OM/oar.
Hi Louis, that’s the OM I’m talking about. That’s what I’m calling OM/oar. At least, close enough for my ear. It may be a little less round, and more umm-ish than what I have in my mind, but not in a way that leaps out at me.
On the other hand, the difference between this and AUM/owm is huge to my ear. It’s like apples and oranges.
Hi David
Yeh, that’s the prounciation I use in the - shri om shri om ayam ayam namah- and it worked really well from the start.
Don’t know why I went with that om because I have been listening to a Buddhist chant cd in the car for the past year or so which uses the AUM sound.
For me the OM as in oar goes straight down into quietness. The AUM seems broader and slower to come down, but might be stronger. But that’s just me experimenting in front of the PC now
The SHRI bringing the energy up first seems to give the OM or AUM coming down, an extra boost.
