Phonetics

A couple of days ago, I came across a few news reports that a professor from IIT Madras (Professor V Srinivas Chakravarthy) has developed a script (called Bharati) to “unify 22 Indian languages”. As a script-enthusiast, I was of course slightly interested. There is a lot of self-congratulatory rhetoric in India about how Indian scripts are very ‘scientific’. On the contrary, the English script (which, in most cases, is the only other kind of script most Indians know) is criticized for being arbitrary, ambiguous, unscientific, what have you.

Since everyone and their grandmother is busy listening to Why this Kolaveri Di for the 4157th time in 3 days (What! You haven’t heard it yet? Get out from under that rock already!), I thought I’d write this short note on a couple of points of linguistic interest in that song. Apart from the extremely catchy tune that refuses to get out of your head even when you are asleep (I am sure loads of people have this song running like a sinister background score in their dreams), one of the things that make this song fun is of course the strongly Tamil accented English.

You may have observed that most speakers of Hindi pronounce ऋ as essentially रि [rɪ] thus pronouncing words like ऋषभ or कृषि or आकृति as रिषभ, क्रिषि and आक्रिति respectively while speakers of Marathi and Gujarati pronounce it as रु [rʊ] thus saying रुषभ, क्रुषि and आक्रुती. It is a completely different matter that most Hindi speakers do not pronounce ष as a distinct sound. They use the same sound for ष and श, roughly the voiceless post-alveolar fricative, which also explains why most of us spent a lot of sweat and blood in memorizing when a word had श and when it had ष—there were no phonetic clues to differentiate between what was essentially a spelling distinction.

[I am writing a series of articles on Languages and Linguistics for a magazine for school kids, EducationEdge, that a friend of mine has started recently. These articles are targeted at students of classes VIII to XII. I will keep posting those articles on Linguistrix once they are published. Here's the first in the series.] “Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Every human possesses an innate ability to acquire language.