Sphelling
As everyone knows by now, I was South Indian in my last birth. I love the languages, I love the cuisines, and I love the classical music. But I do not love the spellings adopted in the South, of Indian words in English. This is not a North Indian vs South Indian post of the variety that seems to abound on the Indian blogosphere. I can’t categorise myself as “North Indian” or South Indian” or anything like that.
I once made the mistake of spelling the word “sutha” as sudha, but then I was just using a spelling I had seen people using on the net. The spelling I prefer the most is actually “suta.”
The spelling was simply a matter of mild amusement, until I started learning Carnatic music. So far I have learned mostly Sanskrit compositions and am getting increasingly irritated at hearing an aspirated “h” where there shouldn’t be one. I think this may have to do with the spelling and the insistence on adding an “h” where it isn’t necessary in transliterations (and removing it where it is necessary).
What is the sense in spelling Mira Bai as Mira Bhai and Kesar Bai as Kesar Bhai? Are these women underworld dons or somebody’s brothers? And where an “h” is needed as in Ananda Bhairavi, it goes missing and it becomes Ananda Bairavi!
I am sure I am going to make huge errors when trying to pronounce Tamil and Telugu. So for that I am going to check with native speakers of each language whether my pronunciation is correct and that I transliterate the words properly. I am aware that there are disagreements amongst the native speakers of these languages on pronunciation-I recently read someone proclaiming the Brahmin pronunciation was the “right” one.
Edited to add: An “h” is sometimes added to distinguish between a soft “t” and a hard “t”. But sometimes this means a word is pronounced with an aspirated “h” after the t or as the “th” in “the.”
Nikhil sent me a very useful link on the Tamil script(thanks):
Relationship with other Indic scripts
The Tamil script differs from other Brahmi-derived scripts in a number of ways. Unlike every other Indic script, it uses the same character to represent both an unvoiced stop and its voiced equivalent. Thus the character க் k, for example, represents both [k], and [g]. This is because Tamil grammar treats only unvoiced stops as being “true” consonants, treating voiced and aspirated sounds are euphonic variants of unvoiced sounds. Traditional Tamil grammars contain detailed rules, observed in formal speech, for when a stop is to be pronounced with and without voice. These rules are not followed in colloquial or dialectal speech, where voiced and unvoiced versions of a stop are, in effect, allophones, being used in specific phonetic contexts, without serving to distinguish words.
Also unlike other Indic scripts, the Tamil script hardly uses special consonantal ligatures to represent conjunct consonants, which are far less frequent in Tamil than in other Indian languages. Conjunct consonants, where they occur are written by writing the character for the first consonant, adding the puḷḷi to suppress its inherent vowel, and then writing the character for the second consonant. There are a few exceptions, namely க்ஷ kṣa and ஸ்ரீ srī.
But do Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam have the same problem? Will have to research that.
And before anyone gets annoyed with me ( I admit I have a prejudice here) I get annoyed by the way South Indian names are pronounced in the North as well, usually with the mixing up of short “a” and long “aa” sounds. Neither are a lot of people in the North bothered with the richness of the languages of the South.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_script#Relationship_with_other_Indic_scripts
Check this link. This may have the answer.
So there may be a confusion when to use a ka(like in karma) and kha(like in khan)
No, Kannada and Telugu have different characters/letters for the aspirated versions of consonant sounds. Just like Hindi/Sanskrit. I think Malayalam does too. All those languages are far more influences by Sanskrit than Tamil is. In fact, it is possible to speak/write a Tamil that is totally free from Sanskrit. Which isn’t the case (to the best of my knowledge) with any of the other three languages.
*influenced. Grr, typo.
Varali, thanks-I knew that, but then Sanskrit words as I know them are pronounced and spelled differently with added “h’s” by people who speak the other South Indian languages as well, even when they know the difference between “b” and “bh” etc. I think I should just accept it-and get over my irritation and prejudice. After all I speak English with an Indian accent not a British one!
How on earth did it take me 6 weeks to find out you were back??
Had a lovely time catching up on all your posts.
Welcome back!!
Sorry I thought I had mailed you
try something in mallu like Kozhikode.. pazham.. and vazhi, it shud be fun!
Clash I do-and my husband and sister in law giggle! But I can speak Marathi and it has a tough “l” sound!
I cannot tell you how much the selective adding or leaving out of the ‘h’, a Malayalee speaking Hindi does, gets my goat! Aaaargh!
Love this post – the beauty and the depth of it. Am interested to find out what your findings are re Telugu, Malyalam and Kannada grammar rules and speech patterns.
F-Hah, I am an honorary Mallu!
DG: All of them have a lot more Sanskrit. As far as I can tell in theory they shouldn’t have the “h” problem but in practice they do!As for the depth-that came thanks to the Wikipedia link!