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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

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
OJFord 5y ago
I'm studying Hindi as a second language, and the inconsistency of transliterations drives me crazy, I'd rather nobody transliterated and just used devanagari if it's not going to be IAST. Worse, Google has updated the (abc -> हिंदी) keyboard on Android so that in many cases it actually refuses the standard transliterations in favour of popular ones, I assume. And so if you want पीता you have to type 'peeta'; 'piita' won't get it, even if you click the caret for more options. It also reinforces things like हूं - which I can understand if you're writing by hand, but why wouldn't a digital keyboard input the 'correct' / 'proper' / whatever हूँ? (To write it there I used the direct input method rather than transliteration one, with which afaik it's not possible to write it.) In fairness to butcherers of Manohar's name though, you really do need to be told/have learnt how the transliteration (IAST or roughly) is supposed to work. Otherwise of course you're going to read it in the language you know. The trouble is, once you do know, you're left wondering if something is transliterated 'correctly' (in standard as opposed to popular fashion) or English-phonetically... Particularly with vowels: 'e' for example is either 'ay' as in 'pay' or 'e' as in 'pee' accordingly. (The latter 'should' be 'ī' or 'ii'.)
- LordAtlas 5y ago
  You have my condolences for Google's nonsense. I have not written anything in Hindi for the past couple of decades, I think, despite growing up in Delhi and speaking the language fluently. All my work communication and conversation with friends is in English. The good thing about Hindi is that if you know the script, it's pronounced exactly as it's written. There are no strange inconsistencies like the monstrosity that is English. > In fairness to butcherers of Manohar's name though, you really do need to be told/have learnt how the transliteration (IAST or roughly) is supposed to work. Otherwise of course you're going to read it in the language you know. I have absolutely no ill-will for people who pronounce any language's names solely after reading them. But if you work with someone and they introduce themselves to you, it's just common courtesy to at least make a best effort attempt to get the syllable emphasis and the vowels right. If you _hear_ it and still get it hopelessly wrong, I would be less charitable.

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

OJFord 5y ago

I'm studying Hindi as a second language, and the inconsistency of transliterations drives me crazy, I'd rather nobody transliterated and just used devanagari if it's not going to be IAST. Worse, Google has updated the (abc -> हिंदी) keyboard on Android so that in many cases it actually refuses the standard transliterations in favour of popular ones, I assume. And so if you want पीता you have to type 'peeta'; 'piita' won't get it, even if you click the caret for more options. It also reinforces things like हूं - which I can understand if you're writing by hand, but why wouldn't a digital keyboard input the 'correct' / 'proper' / whatever हूँ? (To write it there I used the direct input method rather than transliteration one, with which afaik it's not possible to write it.) In fairness to butcherers of Manohar's name though, you really do need to be told/have learnt how the transliteration (IAST or roughly) is supposed to work. Otherwise of course you're going to read it in the language you know. The trouble is, once you do know, you're left wondering if something is transliterated 'correctly' (in standard as opposed to popular fashion) or English-phonetically... Particularly with vowels: 'e' for example is either 'ay' as in 'pay' or 'e' as in 'pee' accordingly. (The latter 'should' be 'ī' or 'ii'.)

LordAtlas 5y ago
You have my condolences for Google's nonsense. I have not written anything in Hindi for the past couple of decades, I think, despite growing up in Delhi and speaking the language fluently. All my work communication and conversation with friends is in English. The good thing about Hindi is that if you know the script, it's pronounced exactly as it's written. There are no strange inconsistencies like the monstrosity that is English. > In fairness to butcherers of Manohar's name though, you really do need to be told/have learnt how the transliteration (IAST or roughly) is supposed to work. Otherwise of course you're going to read it in the language you know. I have absolutely no ill-will for people who pronounce any language's names solely after reading them. But if you work with someone and they introduce themselves to you, it's just common courtesy to at least make a best effort attempt to get the syllable emphasis and the vowels right. If you _hear_ it and still get it hopelessly wrong, I would be less charitable.