Definitive guide to Tamil sounds ca, sa, Sa, sha?

[S.Govindaswamy]

Dear sridhar
You have started this discussion asking for guide for pronunciation of sa, Sa, & sha in Tamiz. The staright forward answer should have been that in Tamiz these sounds (ஒலிவடிவமà¯ÂÂ

[srkris]

Govindaswamy,

Why does the Tolkappiyam not deal much with how the letters are to be pronounced? It's because in tolkappiyar's time, there was no confusion about the letters. If kha, ga etc existed in tamil in his time, he would have had a need to explain the difference between their pronunciations, since only ka existed, he did not need to explain its exact pronunciation.

I am by no means sure of anything, I only strongly believe in certain theories based on my reading and understanding of the language. I believe even in professional circles, there are some linguists who claim that voiced consonants (like ga) but not aspirated consonants (like kha, gha) were there in spoken old-tamil. The last word has not been spoken on the subject. I am only trying to justify why I believe in one theory and not the others.

[sridhar_ranga]

Thank you Mr. Govindaswamy. I do not expect a definitive answer to my question, I am aware that there can be no easy answers. I appreciate all the contributors to this thread and respect the various viewpoints, including srkris's theory that Old Tamil did not have the soft sounds (which I have difficulty in accepting). This thread has also added a lot to my knowledge of terms used by linguists.

[vasanthakokilam]

When I wrote 'solai' is like the english word 'so' and not 'cho', srkris took serious exception to that.

Is it vaNDADum sOlai or vaNDADum cOlai in modern tamil of the past 60+ years and as practiced and accepted today?

Hope there is a definitive answer to this simple question without resorting to debates about tolkappiyam.

[srkris]

It should be cO- and not sO-, but these are dialectical differences that exist even today. Originally it must have been cO, but there are large parts of tamil speakers who pronounce it as cO, as much as others who pronounce it sO. I am not an authority to lay down laws of pronunciation, all of my suggestions are merely suggestions, not prescriptions.

cennai is the capital of tamil nadu, but people pronounce it as sennai. Sennai is obviously not proper according to tamil's phonology, but that doesnt prevent people from accepting and using it. I can say when something is improper, but I cannot change what people accept or use.

[S.Govindaswamy]

Srikris
Most of us agree that the soft sounds (ஒலி வடிவஙà¯ÂÂ

[ragam-talam]

It seems one can get a clue to the 'original' sounds in Tamil based on the existence of these sounds in Malayalam, an offshoot from Tamil. If the theory that Malayalam HAS taken off from Tamil is true, then it must be the case that some of the sounds found in Malayalam must have existed in Tamil.
And Malayalam does have Ka, Kha, Ga etc.

Another thing to note is that various letters in Malayalam are similar in shape to Tamil. Examples include Ka, Ja, na, Na, sa, etc.

Wonder if there's been any research done on these lines at all.

[srkris]

Indeed it is apt to compare malayalam with tamil, as Malayalam is the closest major relative of tamil. Malayalam does recognize all the sounds of tamil as well as those of sanskrit due to its vast sanskrit vocabulary sitting on top of its tamil base. In other words, malayalam has a solid sanskrit superstratum, and a tamil substrate.

The aspirates and voicing present in malayalam are not automatically applicable to tamil since malayalam uses these sounds for its sanskrit words. A malayali would pronounce cOru (cooked rice) as such, not as sOru. Likewise in malayalam centamizh would not be pronounced as sentamizh. So rather than saying that since malayalam has aspirates and voiced consonants, tamil also should have them, it would be better to compare the common non-sanskrit words in malayalam and tamil and see how they are pronounced.

[srkris]

[quote="S.Govindaswamy"]Compound letters are no used in Tamiz. srI (ஸà¯ÂÂ

[vasanthakokilam]

Srkris: Thanks for the technically oriented response. I will try to read up on it.

Except........

>a modern explanation to cover a widely prevalent mispronounciation

Well, why a value judgement there? Is that not what linguistics will call an 'evolution of the language'.

[arasi]

Though I may sound like a naughty child in the classroom who has no sense of decorum, I am going to ask this question:

We tend to say this at a time when we are frustrated or regret something. We use this one syllable expression: CE!
Are there any other ways of pronouncing it? If so, I have not heard it.

CE! May be I should'nt have brought it up

[srkris]

Are there any other ways of pronouncing it? If so, I have not heard it.

CE! May be I should'nt have brought it up

VK, actually I did think of that (the value judgement part). Let's say a small section of the population (like 5% or 10%) pronounce ka as ha, their pronunciation would be branded "erroneous". If the same was done by a large minority (say 40% of the population), the same wouldnt be called "erroneous", but simply another valid way of pronounciation, maybe "a dialectical difference". If the same was done, say by a 90% majority, then whatever the majority does is viewed as the right thing, and the minority (who actually pronounce ka as ka only, not as ha) probably will be branded as the persons who pronounce it wrong, or that they have been left behind as the world has changed around them. What is acceptable then becomes a question of how many people vote for it. In other words, objectivity takes a back seat and the majority's (subjective) opinion/usage takes the lead. When you have a moving target, it becomes complicated. A changing language is a moving target, and any attempt to make historical sense of it may be pointless, even if its possible.

What then happens to a "definitive guide" to the tamil sounds the thread's title seeks?

[vasanthakokilam]

srkris: That is an excellent platform to think about things.

My thinking along these lines is this.

- That is the way it is, get used to it. It is the real world that matters, not some ivory tower intellectuals. They are just parasites intellectualizing on common people's actions and behavior.

- The real world does not change that quickly. There is lot of noise but a 'system' emerges out of all this noise. That is typical of a non-linear complex system

- Such things are characterized by positive and negative feedback which stabilizes the system for a while. That is what the ivory tower people like us love since it is easy to write about.

- That does not mean there is 100% conformance. There is always variation.

- As with any complex system, the system undergoes changes. Slowly if it is left to its own devises or abruptly when there is an external shock

- It takes a while to settle down again in a new "state". Ivory tower people again come in, standardize it and now compare the old and the new and write about it as well. That is what Linguistics is all about. ( But a lot of these Linguists do not understand non-linear systems even though they work in the context of social systems which are by definition non-linear. Not all linguists though, there are exceptions who are well versed in non-linear social systems. They have not produced any major breakthrough but they are humble enough to acknowledge linear rule based inference is only a gross approximation )

- The ivory tower people may not recognize for a long while that the system has reached a new stable state. That does not mean a new stable has not been reached.

- At any time ( spanning a few decades or centuries ), one can talk about definitive guides as applied to the stable system of that time.

That is what happens in all social systems. Any other simplistic view is just that, a simplistic view.

[rajesh_rs]

Tamizh-uuku vaay-irundhAl azhum! (or, as per the colloquially accepted forms, should it be "tamiLukku vaay-irundha aLum"). This is a very informative and interesting discussion.

The many deficiencies of Tamizh as opposed to Sanskrit in terms of the repertoire of sounds, the clarity and lack of ambiguity between words and sounds in Sanskrit as opposed to Tamizh, etc are noted. What steps are being taken to develop the language, given these drawbacks? Are these drawbacks seen lightly by those who are considered responsible for developing Tamizh, or are these drawbacks taken seriously, and are people working to improve the language and better define the sounds that one uses in colloquial Tamizh?

Having grown up in Karnataka (despite being of Tamizh birth) and having schooled in Kannada, English and Sanskrit, I have come to think that Tamizh is a deficient language and cannot be used as precisely in expression as Kannada, Sanskrit or English, and that although bestowed with the same or greater intellect than the rest of India, Tamizh people are handicapped by their language. I ask with humility - am I correct or justified in holding this "generalized" view?

[vasanthakokilam]

>I ask with humility - am I correct or justified in holding this "generalized" view?

I do not think it is a tenable position to take in general especially when you bring in English, also your wordings like 'deficient', 'draw backs', 'handicap', 'intellect' etc. are a bit loosely thrown around for a proper discussion on that topic..... but we need to pursue this in a separate thread and not on this one.

[srkris]

I ask with humility - am I correct or justified in holding this "generalized" view?

I feel your understanding (that Tamil is deficient when compared to Kannada or English or Sanskrit) is misplaced. Kannada, English and Tamil (as with most other languages that are spoken today) are evolving languages, and no language evolves the same way as any other language. Certain common traits can be found in languages belonging to the same family (example: Kannada and Tamil, which belong to the South-Dravidian family, have more in common than say Kannada and Telugu, or Tamil and Telugu, since Telugu belongs to Central Dravidian family). Sanskrit belongs to the Indic (or Indo-Aryan) branch of Indo-Iranian, which is a branch of Indo-European language family.

Classical sanskrit as used today (not the earlier vedic forms) is a "frozen" language. The form of the language has not changed over the last 2500 years at least. People usually call it a dead language, but here it doesn't mean that it is extinct or unused. It has been used widely over the last three millenia, but it is frozen based on the mould created by Panini. The language is not "allowed to change" in the natural process common to other spoken natural languages. This was made possible by a very disciplined and rigid grammatical system with a strong and oldest grammatical tradition (Sanskrit's Grammar is the world's oldest grammar, some information on this can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_Sanskrit_grammar).

Most/All of those who speak and use sanskrit are "Ivory tower people", to paraphrase VK above. They do not recognize or tolerate change in that language. Comparing Sanskrit with any other natural language is therefore bound to be an apples to oranges comparison.

Tamil, Kannada and English are natural (shall we say "normal")languages that are similar to all other living languages which change based on regional and temporal factors, among others. But comparing even English and Kannada with Tamil, one cannot by any means generalize Tamil as "deficient" (deficient in what respect?). Differences cannot be called deficiencies unless there is a common standard or benchmark to measure them.

[rajesh_rs]

Thanks Srkris, for your explanation. I don't mean to offend Tamizh speakers here, but isn't the whole point of the thread to discuss apparent ambiguities in the way the Tamizh language processes sounds which are distinct in spoken form? Naturally, when you apply the idea that languages like Tamizh, Kannada, English, and other contemporary languages are evolving, the "apples to oranges" comparison that Srkris suggested is what is at work, when we're comparing evolving languages to rigid ones like Sanskrit.

With due respect to all Carnatic musicians, some of them really do murder Sanskrit or Telugu compositions because they aren't used to pronouncing some of the words in them in an unambiguous way. I am sure I am not the only one who feels this way. Many of my Tamizh friends have difficulty adapting to a new language. My belief is that the reason Tamizh people more often than not don't speak other languages well is because of the fact that they are taught Tamizh when growing up owing to which they cannot distinguish a wider repertoire of sounds readily and thus have to make a conscious effort. Given that there are many words that have crossed over from Sanskrit, it is common to find them using a Tamizh version of the word or pronouncing it with the sounds found in Tamizh. I'm no linguist and maybe Srkris and Vasanthakokilam may be able to throw more light on this, or provide a more accurate perspective.

Regarding the absence of a common benchmark - is there one for any two sets of languages, really?

[vasanthakokilam]

My belief is that the reason Tamizh people more often than not don't speak other languages well is because of the fact that they are taught Tamizh when growing up owing to which they cannot distinguish a wider repertoire of sounds readily and thus have to make a conscious effort.

Rajesh: You can believe casually in many things including generalizations like the above. I assume that is based on the limited few people who you have interacted with and you are stereotyping based on that and extending it to the language itself. Of course, such opinion forming is very common and all of us do that.

Having said that, I do not think anyone will disagree with that one's mother tongue influences how you speak another language with different sounds. That is usually reflected in what is normally called 'accent'. Definitely, if your language has 'kha' and another language has 'kha', then it is an easy transitiion.

But learning and speaking another language has many more significant things. There is vocabulary, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. You can not attribute a person's inability to learn a new language to the sounds available in the mother tongue of this person.

It will be good if we pursue this in a separate thread. I already feel that this discussion has taken us in a different path. It is an interesting thread for me and I would also like to know how quickly people have picked up other languages, difficulties faced, whether they are attributable to their mother tongue or other environmental factors etc. I am fairly deficient in the number of languages I can understand or speak, but I usually attribute it to my lack of focus on gaining that proficiency.

[rajesh_rs]

Thanks for your reply, Vasanthakokilam. With due respect, a mere observation one makes with most Tamizh people cannot be considered a "generalization" - because it is, after all, an observation. What I will grant you is that I hold this opinion that those educated only in Tamizh will end up having difficulties when speaking non-native syllables and styles. This is as true of the Tamizhan as the Bhojpuri-speaking Bihari or the Bengali or the Punjabi. And I don't consider such an inference a worthless generalization, even if it is a generalization. I concur on your take on accents and the other aspects of learning languages. I realize that this digression is too much trouble for you, so will end the discussion here.

[vasanthakokilam]

Rajesh: It is not any trouble at all for me. This is a significantly different topic that it requires a separate thread. As I wrote above, I am very much interested in this topic. Sorry if I came across disagreeing with you a lot on this. In reality, it was just my attempt to provide possibly some clarity to what you were saying.

>educated only in Tamizh will end up having difficulties when speaking non-native syllables and style

No issues there. Fully agreed. If I have to learn some new sounds that I am not familiar with I have to put extra effort to learn it. An extreme case in point: The "click" languages of Africa, all of us will have to put in extra effort to speak that

But the key point I am making is, sounds are only one part of learning a language. There are many more equally if not more significant aspects to learning a new language like syntactical and semantic structures and vocabulary. I can definitely see how someone who is used to strict 'Subject - Verb - Object' order like English will have some difficulty with another language ( say like Sanskrit or other Indian languages ) where for the most part the order is immaterial since each word carries the specific declension (e.g. case ). If you are talking at that level, then it is much more meaningful.

All this to say that your original point/opinion/generalization that 'tamil's lack some sounds makes it difficult for a native speaker of that language to learn another language' is not tenable. But if all you are stating is 'someone who knows only tamil phonetics will have to put extra effort in learning to pronounce properly telugu and sanskrit compositions', no disagreement there at all.

[srkris]

Regarding the absence of a common benchmark - is there one for any two sets of languages, really?

Precisely the reason why I wouldnt call differences in languages as deficiencies, there being no benchmark or yardstick to measure deficiencies or sufficiencies.

[rajesh_rs]

Point taken. There are differences and not deficiencies, I suppose.

[vasanthakokilam]

Rajesh: That one line summary of yours and srkris's says a lot. A golden rule to live by in many contexts beyond our current topic, languages or music. Thanks.

[arasi]

Subhamastu

[sridhar_ranga]

Bumpin up this thread so that we can continue the sa,cha,Sa,sha discussions in one place.

Again, let us try the word in Malayalam for "chain". It is "changala" and pronounced with a hard "cha" sound.

Kannadigas use the prefix "Cheluva" as in the name "Cheluvanarayana". Ask them how they pronounce it.

Among the Telugus, we have "Chinnasathyam" as in the dance guru Vempati Chinnasathyam. Do they pronounce it "Sinnasathyam"?

Derivative languages such as Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu have kept close to the original pronunciation of the Tamil words they use. It is the Tamil people who are too lazy to pronounce their language correctly.

PS. If we accept your "rules", I suppose we are living in Sennai!

Let's see a few more examples:

The Kannada equivalent of Malayalam word chummA is summA.
The Telugu word for arrack is sArAyam while in Malayalam it is chArAyam.
I presume Tamils in Nellai dist use the Malayali pronunciation of these words while those in Chennai share the Telugu / Kanada sounding equivalents.

Let's await Harimau's word on which people are the laziest

[mahakavi]

Let us try to put these all together.
In Thamizh it is sArAyam, same in Telugu, it is chArAyam in Malayalam, perhpas sArAyam in Kannada too.
If it is bootlegged, it is kaLLac cArAyam in Thamizh, perhaps the same in Malayalam.

as for summA, Thamizh and Kannada say the same thing, Malayalam makes it chummA.

Now when harimau or cmlover sing the song 'summA summA varumO sug(kh)am" do they sing it as chummA chummA........?

[cmlover]

Of course! I am not a Tanjorean. Don't thrust your 'accents' on to us southern Tamils. We share a lot with the malayaLees who pronounce words distinctly whereas you guys go with the Telugus. That does not make your Tamil more legitimate than ours.

Leave us alone

[arasi]

CML,
Don't start the telugu conncection, please! Those of us from the southern most of India may have to deal with "EmaNDi mIru cheppEdi? mA lAganE 'chollu' aNTunnAru kadA? mari?".
So, let's thank each region for their contributions which makes us see similarities in some of our linguistic expressions. BArati, while he took immense pride in tamizh nADu, his tAi nADu, he was even prouder of his India and about all that was good in the wide world he lived in. He was a universal poet, not a parochial 'my own little turf' thinker.

[cmlover]

arasi
Tamil is a growing modern language. It has been influenced a lot by all the other South Indian languages let alone by sanskrit. Unfortunately the latest influence by English has been quite damaging. I am sure even BhArathy would not tolerate that..

[arasi]

True!
mEru malaiyAm, En, imayamumAm bAratiyumE poRuttiDAn (even the himalayan bArati would not bear with it)

[harimau]

Rajesh: You can believe casually in many things including generalizations like the above. I assume that is based on the limited few people who you have interacted with and you are stereotyping based on that and extending it to the language itself. Of course, such opinion forming is very common and all of us do that.

Having said that, I do not think anyone will disagree with that one's mother tongue influences how you speak another language with different sounds. That is usually reflected in what is normally called 'accent'. Definitely, if your language has 'kha' and another language has 'kha', then it is an easy transitiion.

But learning and speaking another language has many more significant things. There is vocabulary, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. You can not attribute a person's inability to learn a new language to the sounds available in the mother tongue of this person.

It will be good if we pursue this in a separate thread. I already feel that this discussion has taken us in a different path. It is an interesting thread for me and I would also like to know how quickly people have picked up other languages, difficulties faced, whether they are attributable to their mother tongue or other environmental factors etc. I am fairly deficient in the number of languages I can understand or speak, but I usually attribute it to my lack of focus on gaining that proficiency.

in response to

My belief is that the reason Tamizh people more often than not don't speak other languages well is because of the fact that they are taught Tamizh when growing up owing to which they cannot distinguish a wider repertoire of sounds readily and thus have to make a conscious effort.

It has been demonstrated that it is very hard to learn foreign languages with radically different sounds after about the age of 7. By that time, it seems several patterns are wired into the brain and it is hard for the person to learn to speak the new language correctly. This also explains why children seem to pick up languages so much better than adults.

[ragam-talam]

In Thamizh it is sArAyam, same in Telugu, it is chArAyam in Malayalam, perhpas sArAyam in Kannada too.

Would any of them pronounce it as 'SArAyam'? Perhaps when the stuff is inside them?
(am reminded of the joke 'brAhmanarkaL sAppiDum iDam')

[mahakavi]

When one is inebriated, he dispenses out the long word sArAyam (after dispensing in the liquid) and calls it the short "kaL" or better yet "kazh" when the tongue gets numb too.

[MaheshS]

Would any of them pronounce it as 'SArAyam'? Perhaps when the stuff is inside them?
(am reminded of the joke 'brAhmanarkaL sAppiDum iDam')

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kBsEsXtikU

[cmlover]

I guess KJY is only saying 'chArAyam' (ചാരായമ്)which is the way it is said in malayalamand not ശാരായമ്...a word that has come from Tamil retaining the Tamil pronunciation...

[Pratyaksham Bala]

Here is a 'fun' poem written by me five years back in spoken Tamizh:-

50:50

Alaram adikkiradu.
“Oh! Seekiram poganum; test irukke!
Paste illaiya?
Coffee kodu.
Shoe enke? Polish podanum.
Penavai kanome!
Tiffin vendam; ippave late!
Appa, School bus varadam.
Scooter rapaira? Cycle thana?
Speeda ponga.
Nalla velai! Watchmanai kanom;
Gate moodavillai! Time irukku.”

“Dei! Etho meeting nadakkudam;
Prayer innikku late!”

-- Pratyaksham Bala, 13.4.2005

People are quite comfortable with this type of conversation, with 50% of the words in English. The fun is: whenever I ask a Tamizh pundit to read aloud this 'poem' written in Tamizh, he starts reading the heading as 'FIFTY-FIFTY', and not 'Aimbathukku aimbathu'.

[MaheshS]

Aimbathukku aimbathu.
or
Padhi Padhi

[kssr]

[quote="Pratyaksham Bala"]Here is a 'fun' poem written by me five years back in spoken Tamizh:-

quote]
But where is the "POEM"??!!!

[mahakavi]

But where is the "POEM"??!!!

It is kept in a safe deposit box. The message is in the medium

[Pratyaksham Bala]

Along with the basic Tamizh Cha, if the available five grantha letters are used, it would be easy to write and pronounce the basic five ‘s’ sounds:-
Cha (Chandran)
Ja (Jug)
Sha (Shanmukham)
S (Samskritam)
Sa (Sankar)

If the grantha letters are totally avoided, one has to pronounce five different sounds with just one letter ‘cha’. Even when grantha letters are used, there is a tendency to use only ja, sha and s, and the letter ‘sa’ is avoided. The reason for this is simple -- many are not aware of the letter sa (sankar), though this letter is the basis on which the letter ‘Sri’ is formed.

All the above four grantha letters were in use for Tamizh writing even during the reign of Raja Raja Chola, about 950 years back, as evidenced by epigraphic inscriptions.

[srkris]

Talking of phonetics, தமிழ் should be written as Tamir, not Tamil. The elephant cave inscription of Kharavela, king of Kalinga in the 2nd century BCE, mentions Tramira desa (tamir lands) as being the lands south of the Godavari.

The ழ is a retroflex R sound, not an retroflex L sound. The retroflex L is ள.

[Pratyaksham Bala]

Talking of phonetics, தமிழ் should be written as Tamir, not Tamil ... ... The ழ is a retroflex R sound, not an retroflex L sound. The retroflex L is ள.

This reminds me of our Japanese teacher Hara San who used to write 'Tamizh' as ‘Tamiru’. That was in 1970! I don't know how it is written now.

In French, 'Tamizh' is written as ‘tamoul’.

[arasi]

You are right!
The japanese say Apparu juicu for apple juice. Though I don't have an affinity for McDonalds, I like the way they say macudonArdu in a sing song way!

[Kannan91]

Just to revive this thread (the languages sub-forum doesn't seem very lively)

In Malayalam, you get old-fashioned "folksy" tadbhavas such as "cīta" for "sīta" and "ciṅṅam" for "siṃham" etc (I'm using the National Library at Kolkata Romanization here). These have been around for a long time, although they are fairly marginal or relegated to baby-talk these days. I think this points towards "c" and not "s" being the original Dravidian consonant, and it's likely that the Tamil pronunciation has shifted to "s" quite recently. This might have been caused by increased Brahmin influence in society during the Middle Ages, resulting in greater usage of tatsamas. In Malayalam, this went hand in hand with the wholesale adoption of grantha letters to write native words, but this obviously was not the case for Tamil.

I'm not being entirely serious about this, but I have a feeling that the shift in Tamil was triggered by hypercorrection - because of all the Sanskrit words now being written in Tamil script, there were many different ways to pronounce the old letter "c". People without etymological knowledge would have tried to compensate by pronouncing it as "s" all the time, even in native words (in which only "c" could occur) and Sanskrit words that were supposed to have a "c"!

[srkris]

Kannan, that was an erudite comment, I agree with your conclusions.

[keerthi]

In Malayalam, this went hand in hand with the wholesale adoption of grantha letters to write native words, but this obviously was not the case for Tamil.

You make an interesting point here,i.e, that of the influence of the introduction of script upon pronunciation, and how it affects the perception of multiple pronunciations, and eventually multiple spellings of the same word.

It is the tyranny of language standardization and script that forces us to enforce a rigid link between each word and a single, unalterable pronunciation and a single unalterable pronunciation.The phonology of the letters used in saMskRta is at least as old as the prAtishAkhya-s, and thereby there is unambiguous fairly precise sound-symbol connection there.All other languages that have fashioned the alphabet at later stages in the development of the languages, have had to grapple with developing a varNamAla that is exhaustive and representative of the language's phoneme bank. Further, the arrival of the written word is problematic in how it deals with dialect variants of words, vis-a-vis their spelling and pronunciation.

The tamizh ca may well have been a sibilant sa or a palatal ca or may have used both as interchangeable alternatives, or not.

The fact that we aspire for a definitive pronunciation, is a sign of the Procrustean need for a single standard.

Would this question of 'standard' pronunciation not have arisen, if there weren't tatsama or even tadbhava borrowings into tamizh?

[sridhar_ranga]

A dear old lady now in her sixties was christened champakalakshmi at birth. She would proudly say that she was born in a place known as champakAraNyam and that a couple of nearby places had a presiding deity of the same name. Her SSLC certificate showed the same spelling. However, NONE of the relatives would pronounce her name that way: most folks her age in the family call her chembA, jembA, and in a few cases, sembA. I haven't heard ShembA from any except her oldest sibling, perhaps influenced by the 'propah' Tamil spoken by his colleagues and friends in the North East Indian City where he worked for many decades.

Somehow, in her mid thirties she decided that none of the above was acceptable way of introducing herself. So she changed her name to "R.S. Lakshmi", R being the initial from hubby's name and S standing for "Shenbaga" Lakshmi. She started insisting that this is the way post cards and inland letters to her must be addressed. Most of the family folks complied, and would even introduce her as Mrs. R.S. Lakshmi to others in family gatherings. But in private conversation inside the home/ kalyana chatram they always reverted to the time tested jemba/chemba. I guess she is proud of her original name now, and proud of the vareity of choices her name offers to folks saying her name.

I never had (& won't have) to choose one pronunciation over the others when facing her - I simply call her ammA. Love you mom. A champakam by any other name is just as sweet!

[rshankar]

Sridhar - great one!

[rajeshnat]

Sridhar
Great one !! You just made my mind trace to a illayaraja song in mid 80's where Asha Bhonsale was singing that song "shenbagame shenbagamE". I was in school and we classmates used to discuss how many variations this Asha bhonsale is singing without even getting one right shenbagamE.

[Pratyaksham Bala]

http://www.inbaminge.com/t/e/Enga%20Oor ... e.eng.html