Saving Sounds

Sane Guruji was a Marathi writer and a freedom fighter. A street in central Mumbai bears his name.

This street is closed now because of Ajmal Kasab's trial at the Arthur Road Jail. Local residents protested and the matter reached the High Court.

During the hearing, the judge pronounced Sane as se-n. Rhyming with pen. That's not the correct pronunciation, Sane is pronounced as saa-ne. Ne as in Ne-t. But it wasn't the judge's fault. English spelling isn't always phonetic.

Not only English doesn't have phonetic spelling system, it lacks letters to represent certain sounds which Indian languages possess. For instance 'ळ' . My own surname contains this sound-unit. It's utterred by rolling the tongue and then flicking it forward. In the English spelling I put `L' in its place, but L can't represent it. So English actually distorts my name.

Another such sound is `ण'. It's nasal, but here the tongue touches the middle part of mouth's roof. It's there in the second syllable of Pune (the city). Of course ne can't represent it.

And this is what I feel: Why not modify the English alphabet a little so that Indian sounds could be represented accurately? It won't require a big change. We can agree on use of dashes or dots (as in German) to modify l and n. With the help of reputed dictionary houses (like Oxford) it could be standardized. In the academic world, additional symbols are in fact used to reproduce Sanskrit names in English writing.

Through U-tube these new sounds could be reached to the non-Indian English speakers.

Otherwise we will lose ण and ळ.