This dates back to my 1st year. A Hyd friend of mine , a very keen observer, asked me about the so called strange spellings in Chennai. That guy's only exposure had been the central-iitm route and it was just the 1st week here. He asked me why "h" is always missing in the spellings here. As in, he said from what he knew and saw, it is Bhaskar, not Baskar. It is Paav-Bhaaji and not paav-baaji. Abhirami and not Abirami. I can come up with many more. I tried explaining that they are directly translating from the Tam script which does not have the ta, tha, ba, bha, type like in Telugu or Hindi . It is just a "pa" for pa,ba and bha. Similarly "ta" for ta, tha, dha etc. He then went on to ask why it is like that and wont we get confused while reading it . Almost every regional language has the bha,tha,dha type in script but not Tamil.
In the same week, a northie friend cribbed that Southies always use an extra "h". He saw this after seeing the hostels named Sarawathi, Sharavathi and girls being spelled Anitha , Kavitha whatever. His contention was that it is Anita,Sarawwati,Kavita as that is how it is written in Hindi. A recent one being Ram Setu and not Ram Sethu.
Another crib of his was that Southies pronounce h as "heych" while it should be "etch".
Any explanations ?
9 comments:
How do you differentiate between a Tata and a Thatha without the "h"?
Good observation by your friends and a witty comment by k7. :)
interesting! its actually fault of english that they dont have letters for those indian sounds
Again there is no ta tha but just a tha in tamil.hence the extra h..
And this is one of the better known thihngs while languages like tamil and 'marathi' have zha as in mozhi , most other languages don't...
There are places in gult land where they add extra 'h' to normal English words!
thats the beauty of the language machcha. [:)] BTW when did u change u r name to Labbaku das? Does it mean "MDS lab- ki- das"
since a northie asked you this question (koschin), ask him why some of them say e-shtyle when it is just style..
there are more e-ses, but i do not remember them right now..
leave alone tht h thing
i nvr understood zh thing
tamizh ...
inga romba mazha( Rain) can u rem tht incident v thought it was maza(joy kinda) ...
spellings and sandie nvr go well .. u know how bad am i in spellings tried all my lyf 2 imprv my spellings but still it creeps ...
Why cant people accept a language as it is? The foundation of Tamizh grammar is different from the other languages, which mainly follow the Devanagari format, hence the confusion in ta, tha and da.
BTW, ta is different from dha and tha.
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