But many of these features are fully attested in Nisey-ala; thus "
retroflex consonants, especially stops" are represented by seven phonemes, and in respect to the typical South Asian word-order features subject-object-verb, adjective-noun, genitive-noun, demonstrative-noun, postposition, standard-marker-adjective, etc., "N[isey-ala] verhalt sich durchaus wie das NIA" (ibid.).
The set of five retroflex consonants ([d] [t] [[??]] [n] [s]) are surely unfamiliar to most American singers.
To learn to articulate the retroflex consonants, practice pronouncing the nonretroflex equivalent of each before the shadow vowel [[??]] (for example, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], and continue repeating while slowly curling the tongue back until the body of the tongue is concave and the retroflex equivalent (in this case, [d]) is reached.
Like the retroflex consonants, they are often replaced in sung Swedish, so singers who experience great difficulty in their pronunciation need not worry.
Likewise, many singers choose to sing without retroflex consonants, except when technical considerations demand it.
The occurrence rules for retroflex consonants cross nearly all morpheme and word boundaries, and the effect is also cumulative (for example an r preceding st makes both the s and t retroflex), as seen in Table (7).
Recall that the retroflex consonants may act as either double or single consonants on preceding vowels in stressed syllables.
A vowel followed by multiple consonants (even those that map to a single phoneme, such as such as [n:] and sometimes the retroflex consonants) is short.
Emeneau, in his justly renowned article on "India as a Linguistic Area,"(1) has remarked, following the painstaking work of earlier scholars as well as his own wide field experience, that
retroflex consonants are found in most languages of India.