After listening some audio samples from links posted -- thank you very much for posting this stuff -- on this thread, I gather that pronunciation of 'a' differs depending on it's place within a word. E.g. in pañha the first occurence of 'a' seems to be pronunced like 'u' in "but" and the s...

A man getting very close to 40s. Found buddhism, in a way, from, not so surprisingly, Alan W. Watts book "the Way of Zen" when 11 or 12 years old. Haven't mentally matured ever since. Likes the (kind of) rationalist approach -- of theravada buddhism -- to all sorts of problems life present...