Continuing the review of Passions of the Tongue

N. Ganesan naga_ganesan at HOTMAIL.COM
Wed Sep 15 20:54:20 UTC 1999


>>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.

   N. S. Raja writes:
   >You will also find plenty of Tamils
   >pronouncing Tamil "ka.n.naki" as "kaNNagi".
   >As for how people write it in English,
   >here are the results from searching
   >on Altavista (http://www.altavista.com/):
   >Search for:       Number of web pages found:
   >--------------------------------------------
   >+kannagi            162
   >+kannaki             29
   >+kannahi              3

All this altavista search shows is that the altavista database
consists  of a majority writing about kaNNaki are educated in english
medium schools and hail from cities like Madras. Establishment
newspapers in English render kaNNaki as kaNNagi, and this in turn,
spreads the kaNNagi usage. I have even heard "akanAnURu", a sangam
text pronounced (wrongly) as "aganAnURu" instead of "ahanAnURu"!
Effect of wrong transliteration into English and then, that spelling
spoken as such. It will be better if kaNNaki gets written as such.

On 4-Mar-98, Dr. Palaniappan wrote a response to Dr. Vidyasankar,
VS<< In the kuRaL, kaRka kacaTaRa kaRpavai kaRRapin niRka ataRkut
taka, my Tamil teacher distinctly enunciated D (for T), d (for t) and
g (for k).  And his pronunciation of the word "english" was something
like "inkilis"  - where k was substituted for g - suggesting that
his English pronunciation was affected by his native Tamil, ..>>

SP>I am surprised that a non-brahmin from Madurai pronounced "taka"
>as "taga" instead of something like "taha". The intervocalic "g" is more a
>characteristic of northern Tamilnadu. (I grew up in Madurai Dt. with a good
>bit of exposure to Tirunelveli dialect at home.) May
>be his language has been influenced by other dialects. Apart from this, the
>phenomenon you are describing is not only in contemporary speech but has
>been for a very long time, from the beginning of writing in Tamil. Tamil
>orthography has made use of predictable rules of pronunciation and done
>away with a lot of voiced
>consonants.

Note that "taka" in the TirukkuRaL beginning with kaRka ... is
spoken as "taha". The word "English" is rendered into
tamil as "iGkilis". Because of the nasal G in "iGkilis",
the "ki" following "G" is spoken as "gi".

Regards,
N. Ganesan

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