WITH EYES WIDE OPEN
D. N. Bezboruah
Of late, I have been both amused and intrigued by the extent to which
transliteration has made inroads into our lives. [I must make it clear
right at the beginning that I am not talking about translation (which is
presenting the content of one language in another) but rather about
transliteration which involves presenting of the text of a language in
the script of another language without any attempt to change the
origil words.] Transliteration has been most commonly observed in the
way Hindi is presented in Roman script. What foxes me is why anyone
should want to present Hindi in Roman script in a country where Hindi is
being taught in schools, thereby making almost everyone familiar with
the Hindi alphabet. Even so, Hindi written in the Roman script has
become so common in newspaper advertisements and hoardings as to cause a
great deal of astonishment. There are other occasions too when
transliteration becomes necessary. Quite often, people reading
translations of literary work also wish to know how the origil text in
an unfamiliar language sounds. That is when transliteration becomes
necessary. That is when the sounds of another language must be presented
in a language that the reader is familiar with. What happens quite
often is that someone reading a translation of an Assamese poem or short
story wishes to know what the origil words sounded like in that
language. People often forget that many of the speech sounds of one
language may not be there in the other language at all. This makes the
task of transliteration extremely difficult. Besides, in many languages
the length of a vowel sound has phonemic significance and brings about
changes in meaning. This may create transliteration difficulties in the
language where vowel length may have no phonemic significance even
though the alphabet has both long and short vowel letters and markers.
Perhaps the best way of getting down to brass tacks is to take up the
case of Assamese and the problems faced in transliteration to English.
As we all know, the English alphabet has 26 letters though the English
language has 44 contrastive speech sounds or phonemes. Of the 26 letters
of the English alphabet, q, c and x are dispensable since they
duplicate the work of k, k+w and s. In English, the situation is most
chaotic in respect of the vowel sounds. We have five vowel letters
trying to do the work of representing 20 vowel sounds. That is why the
English language even has to use consonts to indicate certain vowel
sounds. For instance, in English a doubled consont in words like
dinner, hatted and batted merely indicate that the vowel preceding the
doubled consont is a short one. One only has to contrast the words
diner and dinner; hated and hatted; and bated and batted to see how
consont letters in English help to indicate the associated vowel
sounds. In none of these words with double consonts is the consont
sound actually doubled in pronunciation. This is the kind of thing that
one is unlikely to find in any Indian language.
Unlike English, the Assamese alphabet has 51 letters though it has
only 31phonemes. For instance, our alphabet has both the dantiya
(dental) and moordhanya (retroflex) consonts even though we have only
one series of ta, tha, da, dha and in the spoken form which is
alveolar or danta–mooliya like English. Likewise, Assamese has both long
and short vowels and vowel markers in its alphabet, even though we make
no distinction between long and short vowels in our speech. Besides, we
have consont letters like äâ and åã which are pronounced /s/.
However, the funny thing that happens is that whenever we encounter an
Assamese word or a proper me beginning with the letter äâ, we
transliterate this in English with the ch combition. So we end up
writing Chiring Chapori and Chaliha in English when the more precise
forms would have been Siring Saapori and Solihaa. We keep overlooking
the fact that Assamese does not have the /tò/ sound even though it may
have the letter äâ in the alphabet to represent such a sound that
exists in Sanskrit. Assamese has the /bh/ sound represented by the
letter öâ. Obviously, one cannot use the letter v to represent the
voiced, aspirated bilabial plosive. But we have a lot of people who
write *Vaskar instead of Bhaskar. Likewise, there are people who write
*Vabani instead of Bhabaani.
Transliteration of vowel sounds in Assamese seems to have created
needless problems merely because we have failed to be consistent in the
letters we have chosen to represent Assamese vowel sounds. It is a good
idea to use aa to represent the õ± sound or the vowel marker ± after a
consont letter. We can use the letter a to represent the õ sound or
the vowel component of a consont not modified by a vowel marker like ±
. In the same way, we can use the letter i for the short /i/ sound and
the letters ee for the long /i:/ sound. I can well anticipate questions
relating to the elusive one–to–one correspondence between sound and
symbol that is supposed to exist in all languages but does not. I can
anticipate people asking me how to represent the õ’ and ý vowels of
Assamese. If the letter o is used for the õ’ sound, what do we do for
the ý sound of Assamese? Well, the elusive one–to–one correspondence
does not exist even in English where one vowel letter often has to
represent different vowel sounds. Take for instance the word woman in
English where the vowel sounds are /u/ and /¶¶ / in the singular and /i/
and /i/ in the plural form. After encountering such arbitrariness in
English there is hardly any need to lose much sleep over having to use
the same letter o for ý and õ’ in Assamese.
We often tend to forget that many students in the villages learn to
pronounce English words and mes through the transliterated forms as
they appear in newspapers and magazines in Assamese. The most classic
example of a mispronounced me having attained currency in Assamese is
Venus. For years, the me has been written in Assamese as îöâò±äâ
instead of the more correct form öâïò±äâ. The kind of currency that the
mispronounced form of the me has acquired in Assam is likely to make
the correct form quite ucceptable to a whole lot of people. This is
what the mindless acceptance of incorrect forms does to a whole
generation of young people who should have greater exposure to correct
pronunciations of mes. This cannot happen through mere wishful
thinking. It could happen only if editors of Assamese newspapers learn
to use the English Pronouncing Dictiory by learning to use the IPA
symbols and to formulate the correct Assamese transliterations for such
words and mes. What is very alarming is an almost pathological
reluctance to look for the correct pronunciation of foreign mes and
words before venturing into print. This is a rather saddening aspect of
the lack of professiolism that is gradually creeping into several
professions. A copy of the English Pronouncing Dictiory is easily
available in the city, and it does not take more than three or four days
for anyone to learn the phonetic symbols that are used in the
dictiory. It is not much to expect from responsible editors who should
be concerned about ensuring that the editors of tomorrow are better
groomed than they are for their tasks and exposed to the right kind of
inputs that will make them better professiols.