“Translation is treason.” – Old Italian proverb.
Like so many other 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants, over the past few years I have made various half-hearted attempts at learning my parents’ native tongue – which, in my case, is Punjabi.
No, wait: maybe I should type ‘Panjabi’.
Which is correct? No-one knows. Or, at the very least, nobody agrees. See, in the specific instance of P… – well, that language from Northwestern India and Eastern Pakistan – there is no explicit vowel between the the ‘p’ and ‘n’ sounds in the name of the language. It’s implied. In fact, probably the best way to type the word in English letters would be “P’njabi”. I think.
Which, when you’re slightly OCD about rules in language, is awesome. More to the point, it means that when we are called upon to translate how words sound, most of us are totally at a loss.
Why the confusion? Well, unless you count obscure and difficult to learn phonetic alphabets, there is no easy yet systematized set of rules that state clearly which letters in the latin alphabet signify which sounds in non-latinate languages. And as we see increasingly more examples of linguistic and cultural overlap, where learning languages and translation across cultural lines is a necessity, this feels like a problem that needs solving – ’cause what we have right now is a mess of inconsistency.
Bollywood is great for examples of this. In the word ‘kuch’ in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, the ‘u’ stands for a short ‘oo’ sound, as in ‘look’. Yet, in the song “Ishq Samunder” the ‘u’ signifies the same vowel sound as in ‘hut’. Similarly, the ‘a’ in Samunder is pronounced like the a in ‘ago’, while in ‘gham’ in Kabhi Kushi Kabhi Gham, the ‘a’ stands for a long ‘ah’ sound like in ‘car. Oh, settle in – we’re just getting started.
Sometimes this long ‘ah’ sound goes by a single ‘a’, but at other times it is indicated by ‘aa’, which is why you get both ‘dal’ and ‘daal’ on restaurant menus, and why most non-Indians pronounce – erm, dhaal? – as if it were the first syllable of the word ‘Dalhousie’. Fun!
More complicated, however, is that in… - crap: P’njaabi? – and hundreds of other languages, sounds exist which latinate letters can’t explicitly designate. Going back to ‘dal’, the first sound of the word is a soft d, formed by pushing the tongue against the fleshy bit just above one’s teeth and flattening the tip, making a sound halfway between ‘d’ and ‘th’. Because of this, many words with this soft d sound have it written as ‘dh’.
Trouble is, one has to distinguish between the aspirated and non-aspirated versions of the sound (i.e. the ones with and without ‘a strong exhale of breath’). The… fine! P’njahbee! – word for cilantro starts with the aspirated form of the ‘soft d’ syllable, which you make by placing the flattened tip of your tongue against the spot where the roof of your mouth and teeth meet and then exhaling air with the production of the sound (while, naturally, you spin anti-clockwise three times, glancing up at the sky at those times the moon is in the third quadrant).
So, when using latin script, some write the word for coriander as dhhania, others as dhania and others, most confusingly, as dhdhania, where the repetition indicates the aspiration. Keep in mind that that ‘a’ here is now the same sound as the ‘u’ in ‘cut’ – but that when you put ‘dhhania’ into ‘dal’, the a in ‘dal’ which should be better written ‘dhaal’, sounds like the ‘a’ in ‘czar’.
What? That’s totally clear. Or not.
Of course, one could object to a call for formalisation and systematization, claiming that it unnecessarily restrains creativity and play. But trip-ups in language are only fun when you’re in on the joke. To wit, linguistic slippage is entertainment to word-nerds, but just frustrating for everyone else.
People need to learn languages – and just as importantly, they should learn languages. The era of monolingualism should end; to speak only one language seems out of touch with the global future offered by the internet, particularly if we want to avoid online monoculture and foster something like real cultural exchange.
And in order to begin learning a language, I think some translation from one script to another is necessary. It’s all well and good to insist one simply learn a new script, but it’s not an easy thing, and represents a hurdle that slows fluency considerably. If one can use a phonetic spelling of another language, you can get going a heck of a lot more quickly. And if translating sound is a necessary intermediate step, then we really need to figure out how we’re going to do that.
So, who’s up for the challenge? ‘Cause, I’ll be honest – I could really use some help with this P’njaabee.
