One of
the British commentators on Star Sports, showing the 2014 T20 Cricket World Cup
pronounces the name of Sri Lankan bowler Mallinga as “Mallingar.” Have you
noticed? Some, but not all, of the news anchors on BBC World, often pronounce
India and China as Indiar (or Indyer) and Chiner, respectively. Some, but not all. Why?
Most of
you may have read Shakespeare’s play Julius Ceasar and remember a character
called Mark Antony or Marcus Antonius. The months July & August are named
after Julius and Augustus Caesar.
Have you wondered why they months are not called
Julius and Augustus instead? What is this “us” suffix of some Roman names:
Brutus, Cassius, Aurelius? And why are they not used by modern Italians? Similarly
why do some Greeks have name ending in “es” – Socrates, Archimedes, Thales,
Hercules?
If
you studied Hindi or Sanskrit, you remember the vowel series : a, aa, i, ee, u,
oo, etc.going along nicely, then suddenly they finish with “um”, “ahaa” and you
wondered what on earth that was all about?
Ok, I didn’t
wonder about any of these until recently.
The um
ahaa are not really vowels, they are called anusvara and visarga, respectively.
Several words in Sanskrit end in not with a vowel or consonant as the last sound,
but with this visarga, the ahaa sound.
So names like Rama, Krishna, Brahma, Bhima,
Ashva and Vrushaba, are really pronounced Ramaha, Krishnaha, Brahmaha, Bhimaha,
Ashvaha, Vrsuhabaha. In Hindi, and other regional Aryan languages they lose
this terminal visarga, and even the short vowel a sound and are pronounced Ram, Krishan, Brahm, Bhim, etc.
Some names
ending in short i or short u, as in Hari, Guru which end in a visarga are pronounced
Harihi, Guruhu. In fact writing doesn’t properly, there is not a full finish of
the breath of air coming from the mouth to finish these sounds. That is why the
separate sound ha ह is
not used to spell these words when they are written. This visarga was the soft
expulsion of breath that accompanied the last short vowel pronounced among the
earliest speakers of Sanskrit – the Vedic people – and was included by them in
their alphabet.
Some of
you may know that in 1784, Sir William Jones, an employee of the East India
Company, Judge of the Calcutta High Court, founder of the Asiatic Society of
Bengal, discovered and formally wrote about the linguistic connections among
Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, which is now called the Indo-European language group.
Modern linguistics, the comparative study of the common roots of languages,
their geographic origins, grammars, etc begins with this hypothesis by Jones.
In 1816, the Dravidian group of languages was discovered to be separate from
the Sanskritic Indo-Aryan by FW Ellis in Madras, and in 1856, Robert Caldwell
discovered the Munda group of languages spoken in India.
The es & us endings of the Greek &
Roman names, or words, as in Socrates and Marcus Antonius, are the visargas of
those languages : i.e. the Sanskrit versions of these name would have been Socrateehi साक्रेटीः or
Markaha Antoniaha मार्कः
अन्टोनियः! And this
continues in some sections of the English speaking population of Britain today,
whose visarga is the “ar” sound –
hence Indyar, Chinar. And Lasith Malingar मलिङ्गः !
Incidentally,
in a biography of Paul Dirac, “The Strangest Man”, its author Graham Farmelo mentions
that natives of the town Bristol, like Dirac, used an “AL” visarga – in his words, “Bristol is the town that turns ideas into ideals and areas into aerials.”
Tailpiece My Sanskrit teacher
Balasubramanian, says George W Bush pronounces English numbers with Tamil phonemes.
Ok, read that sentence again J What he means is, Bush would say
“Fordy fie” when he meant “Forty five.”
