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I'm always puzzled by certain British imperial transliteration schemes that seem to do their best to set you up for failure and embarrassment. Apparently "Burm

• LordAtlas 5y ago
  OK, I'm Indian and I will stipulate that transliterations of Devanagari are inconsistent, but that guy you linked to is just being a crude racist asshole. (0:39 "and it's so appropriate because she's Indian." Fuck you, Paul Henry!) In the specific case, her last name would be pronounced "deekshit", with both "d" and "t" being soft like in Spanish. Both those consonant sounds do not exist in standard American/British English. What is more exasperating to me is that we are not even consistent in English spellings of the same names. For instance, "Sameer" and "Samir" are both pronounced the same but the first is closer to the actual pronunciation. As far as pronunciation goes, I have made peace with foreigners incorrectly pronouncing sounds that don't exist in their languages, but it bugs me when they can't be arsed to get the syllable emphasis right or when they use the wrong vowel sound even though the correct vowel sound is familiar to them. Example of #1: A friend of mine is named "Manohar". The syllable emphasis and spelling is: "Muh-NOH-huhr". But his name gets pronounced as "Man-oh-HAAR" in the US. And it's not because he's pronouncing it wrong. Imagine if he pronounced every "Michael" as "Mikhail". People would be pissed. Example of #2: I can understand them not pronouncing the soft "t" and "d" in "tandoori", but not so much having the first syllable rhyme with "can" instead of "run". Or "Punjab" becoming "Poon-jab" instead of "Puhn-jaab". Also, #PSA, Hindi does not have the "zh" sound in it, so please stop pronouncing "Raj" as "Razh". Thank you. :)
  • Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
    > In the specific case, her last name would be pronounced "deekshit", with both "d" and "t" being soft like in Spanish. Both those consonant sounds do not exist in standard American/British English. So he did get the fricative right after all? The sounds certainly exist, unfortunately there is no unambiguous way of denoting them without resorting to the now archaic "ð" and "þ". Could you perhaps shed some light on what a seemingly silent "h" after a consonant really indicates? Take names like "Delhi" and "Bhopal". > Example of #1: A friend of mine is named "Manohar". The syllable emphasis and spelling is: "Muh-NOH-huhr". But his name gets pronounced as "Man-oh-HAAR" in the US. And it's not because he's pronouncing it wrong. Imagine if he pronounced every "Michael" as "Mikhail". People would be pissed. I agree that errors in emphasis are far more jarring than errors in sounds, but using the native cognate in the language being spoken of a foreign name in that category is actually very common and often encouraged by the bearer of the name. Perhaps because it has already been mangled so many times since its Hebrew origin through Koine to all the modern languages that use it. On thing that has always puzzled me is despite of what a dumpster fire Devanagari transliteration to Latin is, it seems to still have a massive buy-in with native speakers online. In places like social media or the Indian channels on the company Slack, it seems more common than actual Devanagari. I see the same pattern with Malayalam being written in Latin rather than its own script. If there's no need to accommodate people who don't know the script, I fail to see the point. I've asked but people usually get very defensive about it. Are they ashamed of having different scripts from the globally dominant one, Latin? I would rather consider it a point of pride.
    • LordAtlas 5y ago
      > So he did get the fricative right after all? Did not sound like that to me. He pronounced "d" and "t" as ड and ट when it should be द and त. I think the first consonant is closer to how you might pronounce the article "the". > Could you perhaps shed some light on what a seemingly silent "h" after a consonant really indicates? Take names like "Delhi" and "Bhopal". Oh boy. OK, "Delhi" is the Anglicised name of the city name, which in Hindi is "Dilli", so it's actually pronounced "Del-hi", hard "D", faint "h". Though it could be clipped to sound just like "deli" depending on whom you're speaking to. But in cases where it's a transliteration, _usually_ it means that it's an aspirated version of the consonant in question. "Bhopal" is one such instance. The Devanagari script has, for some consonants, multiple versions: soft, aspirated soft, hard, aspirated hard. (I'm not a linguist; there may be better terms for these.) Let's take "d". There's the soft "d" pronounced as Spanish-speaking people pronounce "d". There's a hard "d" pronounced as in "door". Then there's "dh" and "ddh", which are the aspirated forms of the respective letters. (Google "pronounce Bhopal" and switch to the "Indian English" pronunciation option. I also checked the top 5 or so youtube videos and ALL of them are wrong; they have an American pronouncing it. WTF?) But as I mentioned, our transliteration is not standardised and it's indeed a dumpster fire, so sometimes, the consonant is "ddh", but it's written as "dh" in a word, which does not help things at all. Want more complications? In South India, "th" is often used instead of "t" in names where there's a soft "t". But it's pronounced exactly the same. [1] Oh, and Devanagari is a simpler script. Other Indian languages like Malayalam have even more sounds that Westerners have zero hope of pronouncing correctly. Heck, Indians from other states struggle with it. As for names, you'll find multiple spellings for names that are pronounced the same. I have friends named "Aarti" and they are spelt "Aarti", "Arathi", "Aarthi", and "Arati". A royal mess. And this is before some idiotic astrological/numerological superstition makes them add unnecessary letters to their names. (Not common, but does happen.) > In places like social media or the Indian channels on the company Slack, it seems more common than actual Devanagari. I can only speculate that there are two reasons for this: 1) PC keyboards in India are English QWERTY and typing regional language text on them is a pain. 2) The medium of instruction in middle class education is English, so many of us grow up speaking English well. And in some cases like mine, think in English too. As we progress in our careers, communication in the workplace is in English, and writing fluency in native languages decreases. It's just easier to type it out in English. I consume pretty much all my Internet content in English (though I can speak 3 Indian languages), and it bugs the hell out of me too because I have to translate from the weird English transliteration to the native language in my head first. And that's before people use SMS-like contractions for words. [1] Speculative answers here: https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/5uwcwi/people_from_south_india_why_do_you_add_an_h_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/5uwcwi/people_from_s... This will only make sense to you if you read Hindi: https://qr.ae/pG5zMP https://qr.ae/pG5zMP
• squiggleblaz 5y ago
  > Apparently "Burma" is supposed to be pronounced in a non-rhotic fashion, but would it have killed the non-rhotic speakers to write "Bama"? Then the rhotic speakers who form the majority of English speakers would have at least had a fighting chance to get it right. To be fair, Bama wouldn't be the right pronunciation. The easiest way for an RP speaker to indicate what the right pronunciation should be is to write "Burma". An American might try Buhma. And your complain about "rhotic speakers" being "the majority of English speakers" could only have been taken into account of the British transliterator had access to a time machine to determine the future. At the time, a person in the British empire wouldn't have been considering the opinions of an American, because America and Britain had separate spheres of influence and a generally amicable but not integrated existence. To them, RP was the language of the elite and that was all that mattered. But if they were to consider the situation in America, they would have seen that in America as in Britain, non-rhotic accents were on the rise and were somewhat prestigious. If they were going to consider the future situation of the 21st century globe and how someone might pronounce the word in an American-centred word, it would have been entirely reasonable for them to have supposed it would have been one with a non-rhotic accent. Another matter you might consider is that a very strict spelling would not necessarily help matters anyway. The J in Beijing is pronounced more-or-less like an English j, but that doesn't stop people from mutilating it into the s of measure. Or the person who responds to you, who observes that "Punjab" should be pronounced roughly like the English spelling should indicate, but which is often pronounced with the u of push instead - both because of a widespread assumption that all words in foreign languages are pronounced like Italian, Spanish or French. And the final matter, which might hopefully set your blood at some ease, is to note that when a word is borrowed into a foreign language, it is subject to different pressures. You are not obliged to pronounce "Burma" or "Myanmar" the way any particular natives of Burma or Myanmar do. The English words are English words, intended to help English speakers identify a place in a generally non-offensive manner. There will always be variation between the source pronunciation and the destination pronunciation, especially once a few hundred years have intervened, and that's fine. The question is can we all agree that these are suitable words for referring to that country? English is one language with multiple dialects, so words that enter the language from a certain dialect will reflect that history to a greater or lesser degree. Even when there isn't an "r" in the spelling, Americans still manage to put an r into the pronunciation, as with Goethe or Gödel. So to blame the British for unetymological r is just false. Americans do it because they recognise the unity of the language, and they're communicating rather than upholding any particular notion of perfection. It is unreasonable to say that the only reason for the British to do the same is that their life depends on it.