Continuing the review of Passions of the Tongue

[N. Ganesan]

Sri. N. S. Raja writes:
>I believe that most Tamilians, if asked
>to identify the main characters of
>"silappadhikaram", would name
>Kannagi, ....

  Most Tamils will read what is written as "ka.n.nakai"
in tamil alphabets as something like "ka.n.nahi".
I attempted to explain this here on 6-Mar-98 under
the heading, Tamil pronunciation.

May be due to Sanskritized thinking, some English writers
render Tamil "ka.n.naki" as kannagi. This happens because
they transfer all intervocalical Tamil "k"s into "g"s
following Sanskrit k, kh, g, gh series. However, Tamils
pronounce her as something like kaNNahi.

Regards,
N. Ganesan


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