Saturday, December 23, 2006

Bengaluru is an incorrect form of Bangalore

I was having a discussion with Srikanth at Srican on loss of vowels in spoken languages. The discussion drifted away to Anusvara. The nasal consonants ('~g' and '~j' only) have totally vanished from present day Kannada and their place has been taken by anusvara, an import from Indic languages(or could be a local innovation).

In my opinion, Bengaluru (ben-ga-Looru) would have kept its form in spoken language(generally pronounced ben-gLooru) if the written from used nasal consonant '~g' instead of anusvara 'n' between 'be' and 'ga'. But according to Srikanth, though Tamils use '~g' in the written from their spoken form is similar to Kannadigas(loss of 'a' after 'g').

Something is seriously wrong here. The written language should follow the spoken form of native speakers and not the other way round. Therefore, you have phonetics. However, if apply the same rule to Kannada, the language will lose its charm. Many of Kannada spoken forms are simply unspeakable. I think I am missing something here.

I was comparing Malayalam(a Dravidian language with more phonemes than any other major Dravidian languages) words with nasal consonants to Kannada words with anusvaras. I was stuck with a single word which means 'like that'.

In Malayalam, 'a(~g)ne' is the word. The word in literary Kannada is 'haage'. But the Mysore region spoken form is 'hange'(or if you want an exact match you can say, 'hangene'). We can see that a single nasal consonant(~g) is replaced by an anusvara(n) and a consonant (ga). For some reason, Kannadigas have lost many of the consonants and their replacements have reduced the charm of the language. However, literary Kannada, unaware of the losses has modified the words in such a way that though they sound beautiful, many a time, do not have any correspondence with the spoken form.

As we are in the middle of changing the names of our cities to their native forms, I think now it is the time for us to go one step forward and revert back to the original forms of some of these names. I think Bengaluru must be Be(~g)luru. Wait a minute. When we are already in this path, we can think of something more radical. Let us revive our own Kannada 'zh'! I believe a 'nasal consonant' will have a natural companion in a retroflex.

Welcome to ಬೆಙೞೂರು(Be(~g)zhuru) or may be ಬೆಙೞೂಱು!