Kerala became Keralam in a matter of minutes. The bill was brought to the Lok Sabha and, before anyone could say Jack Robinson or Thiruvananthapuram, the ayes had it, the ayes had it.... Ab aayega mazaa. Trivandrum became Thiruvananthapuram aeons ago, but Hindi speakers still call it Tri-ve-dhrum. Likewise, they will continue to call the state Keral (Ke-rel), raising the hackles of Malayali purists.
Foreigners would add to the cacophony. Going by the logic of English spelling, they will call the state Kere-laam. Pucca sahibs would say, if the word has to be pronounced the way it is in Malayalam, it should be spelt Keralom.
Not convinced? Spell and pronounce Absalom. Or cymbalom, epicoelom, and exocoelom. Don’t ask me what these words mean. Ask the Tri-ve-dhrum MP.
A word ending in ‘am’ is more likely to be pronounced ‘aam’ by Anglophones. Malayalis know it. Royal houses in Kerala call their homes kovilakom, and not kovilakam.
Malayalis don’t mind having it either way—they have Kovalam and Kumarakom; both end in short ‘um’ and compete for tourist dollars. And there’s Malayalam, not Malayalom. Aam, um, or om, Malayalis want a nasal twang somewhere. They call Telugu Telungu.
Spelling disputes can get nastily nasal. Krishna’s baby-killer uncle is Kans in the north, but Kams(a) in the south. Dev of the rest of India is Deo in Maharashtra. North Indians spell Rashtrapati; southerners write Rashtrapathi. The same with Bharat and Vande Mataram. Southerners prefer Bharath and Vande Matharam—redacted as the AICC wished on last week’s I-Day, or in full text as the singers willed.
We can standardise spellings, not pronunciations. When it comes to the latter, we are as much sinners as the Anglo-Saxons who Cawnpored our Kanpur. We call Pari Paris, Roma Rome, Rus Russia, Moskva Moscow. Anglo-Saxon contagion, we may say. Apologies, Matthew Arnold!
State names change, but High Courts retain old names. Just like we still have High Courts of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, the High Court of the newly nasalised state will continue to be Kerala. Only Uttarakhand High Court transitioned from Uttaranchal. Universities usually retain old names, but Bombay’s turned Mumbai whereas Calcutta and Madras retain legacy names.
I had a prof—he taught us phonetics—who claimed that some (not all) of the colonial spellings were closer to nativespeak than the newer ‘nationalised’ names. No Malayali called the city Thi-ru-va-nan-tha-pu-ram, he used to say. Even when in no hurry to catch a flight to the Gelf, the Mallu called it Thiruvanthrom.
Speech was less sanskritised in the olden days than was the written word. Colonial officers went by the received pronunciation, and not any received spelling. Linguists standardised them through phonetic approximation.
Two Joneses have a lot to do with how we ought to spell Indian words and pronounce English words. It was the Asiatic Society founded by William Jones in 1784 that pioneered Roman spelling systems for Sanskrit words. That enabled scholars to accurately transcribe Indic scripts into the Roman alphabet without losing phonetic precision, using diacritical marks. The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration descended from his efforts.
Daniel Jones, no relation of William, was a 20th century linguist who gave us the English Pronouncing Dictionary, still considered the bible of phoneticians. He re-imagined the word ‘phoneme’ to mean what it means today, and gave us the concept of cardinal vowels.
Let’s try and keep up with the newer Joneses.
prasannan@theweek.in
