NYT lost in translation, should have checked facts

Credit where it is due: One of the world's most famous media houses, The New York Times, has sought to explain to its readers in the United States and across the world how certain names in the southern part of India are pronounced. This sensitivity to the way different languages across the globe work is most welcome.

The NYT's correspondent has this version of how to pronounce the Tamil noun, MelaThiruvenkatanathapuram.

"MELA THIRUVENKATANATHAPURAM = MELA + THIRU + VENKATA + NATHA + PURAM

= Me-la Thi-ruVen-ka-ta Na-thaPu-ram

= May-la Thi-ru Wayne-ka-ta Na-thaPu-ram

If you want to dive deeper:

Mela > May + la as in lamp.

Thiru > Th as in "that" + i + ru as in root.

Venkata > ven as in wayne + ka as in cart + ta as in task

Natha > naa + dha as in "that"

Puram > pu as in poor + ram (as in ram for male sheep, not Ram for Hindu god)."

A welcome effort!

Some problems, though:

As a south Indian who grew up mostly in Karnataka speaking Kannada and a version of Tamil but having lived in Chennai (Madras as it was then, decades go) and with an ear for the way Tamil is pronounced by various people across India, including in New Delhi which is teeming with "Madrasees" (I too having been one for 11 years until 1988), might I suggest that The NYT could have done a little more homework? Herewith a few suggestions on how The NYT's version can be improved:

1. Wayne-ka-ta Na-thaPu-ram, albeit a good attempt at transliteration, fails crucially on the vowel front. Also on the consonant front: most south Indian languages do not distinguish between the "w" sound and the "v" sound. In fact, both sounds get transformed into a "b" sound as in Basant(h) for Vasant(h). As for "Na-tha", try Naa-tha: vowels come in long and short forms in Indian languages. The difference can be crucial.

2. In puram, the "ram" part is a short vowel, as in rum, NOT as in Ra(a)m-jun-ma-bhoo-mi. That needs to be pointed out.

3. In Tamil (as in Chinese, some consonants take either a hard or soft sound or somewhere in between: Beijing may well be pronounced Peiching - it's the tone that's important. Remember it was spelled Peking until the early 1980s.

Also Kwang-tung/Guangdung and, more importantly, Mao Tse-tung/Mao Zedong). Bhagavaan can only be written as Pakavaan in Tamil. On some Tamil religious TV channels, it is, in fact, pronounced as such. There is no consonant for "ha" in Tamil: "ka" is used instead.

Thus Mahaalingam is written as Makaalinkam and often pronounced as such. Padma is written as Pathma in Tamil and I once heard a Tamilian living in Delhi pronounce his sister's name as Badma, perhaps in jest, knowing that the addition of the letters "sh" at the end could have transformed the meaning in Hindi/Urdu.

Thus The NYT might consider: Vaayn-ga-da-naa-t(d)ha-p(b)u-rum.

4. As for Thiru, no, the second syllable is rarely pronounced as in "root" but most often as in "ugh".

Another example: Thiruvenkatanarayanan (as is usually transliterated), may be pronounced Thi-ruh-vayn-k(g)a-t(d)a-naa-raa-yuh-Nun (the last "n" pronounced with the tongue curling up.

That said, and now that we're in the thick of breast-beating on nationalism and Bhaarath Maatha and all that, India had a (forgettable) president - Raa-sh-truh-puh-thi-jee - named R Venkataraman. Simple name: five syllables, the fourth one with a long vowel, but one mangled badly on All India Radio and Doordarshan for decades, "Bun-kut-ruh-mun", having been one of the more egregious examples.

Which brings me to one of my pet peeves, the illogical change in the official spelling of Bangalore in English: it is now Bengaluru. At least two glaring problems: the "l" therein is NOT pronounced as it is in north Indian and European languages.

South Indian languages, Marathi, Korean and perhaps some other languages have a consonant that falls between "l" and "d". For instance, the "l", as in the name Pramila, is pronounced by speakers of Marathi and southern Indian languages not as "lah" but with the tip of the tongue curled up - a sound somewhere between "l" and "d". In Kannada and other south Indian languages, a city is often called "ooru", one long and one short vowel. In the now official "Bengaluru", that gets badly mangled.

In other words, while the change from, say, Simla to Shimla or Calcutta to Kolkata might be logical, that from Bangalore to Bengaluru is devoid of logic. In fact, a centenarian lexicographer named G Venkatasubbaiah had weighed in on the issue prior to the needless spelling change to say as much.

The spelling change was effected at the instance of the late UR Ananthamurthy, an eminent litterateur riding on a hobby horse and leading the state to waste unnecessary resources in reprinting and repainting on a massive scale.

As an Indian saying goes, "We're like this only".