It * is * possible, after all, that the first person who showed up in Jawaharlal and transliterated it into Roman script was French.
Maybe you’ve noticed that English isn’t red hot on phonetic spelling? You’re assuming there is such a thing as a standard English pronounciation. Especially for foreign languages. In fact, there’s a wide choice of possible pronounciations for any given spelling and without in-depth knowledge of the native language of the area, it’s hard to choose the right one.
Given various dialect shifts and spelling changes since the British colonial days, there’s no reason to think that any transliteration of Indian place names is particularly accurate. Unless you think “Bombay” is close to the original pronounciation than “Mombai” or “Calcutta” is closer than Kolkata.
Basically, people are trying their best and you’re not cutting them any slack.
Geez, it’s an honest mistake. If you come across a word or name you’re not familiar with, but are pretty sure it’s not English, you’re going to have to guess at the pronunciation. And especially with names, some people can get really touchy about having to correct others all the time (trust me, after correcting people for 20+ years, your patience starts to wear thin). So you hazard a guess. You may get it right, you may not.
For example, when I see the name Raju, my frist instinct is definately not to pronounce it with a hard j.
This is a tangent, but – “Bombay” is not an attempt to transliterate “Mumbai.” It’s from the Portuguese “Bom Bahia.”
And there’s no reason to think that when pronouncing the word “Bombay” that you are being more correct by pronouncing it “Mumbai.” “Bombay” is “Bombay” and “Mumbai” is “Mumbai.” They are two different words.
Very funny. “The sound in Indian languages transliterated with the Roman letter J is pronounced the same as the common pronunciation of J in standard American and British English, as in judge or jury.” Better?
Looking at the chart you link to, J is used to translate the third Devanagari letter in the second row of consonants. If you run your mouse over it, you’ll see the Romanisation.
Yep. My mistake. (Although I guess it’s possible that some Portuguese navigator asked what the name of that there island was and the locals said “Mumbai” and he heard “Bom Bahia”.)
Still, the point is valid. Transliterations aren’t particularly good, and English isn’t a particularly rule-abiding language. So without signposts, people muddle through the best they can. It’s pretty mean-spirited to take offense at it. Tell me that you’d do any better at place names wandering through Wales for the first time.
Does English have many words with a ‘j’ in the middle? I think the J sound for judge & jury is only really encountered at the beginning of words.
(Pause for someone to produce a list of English words with “j” in the middle )
I think that class of sound in English (I can’t remember what IPA calls it) gets swtiched to a “ch” or a “sh” sound when it occurs in the middle of the word. Or when it occurs at the end. Really, I most often associate ‘j’ in English as a variation of ‘i’ or ‘y’ due to the Latin/French roots of the language.
What I’m trying to get at here is, I really don’t think there’s one standard pronunciation of ‘J’ in English. Not so standard that a native English speaker should assume that’s what the letter stands like. Especially when faced with a j in the middle of the word, I think an English speaker has to pick a foreign pronunciation because that letter placement just doesn’t occur in English. There’s no default sound in English for middle-occuring “j”'s like Punjab.
And I would think that making it into “zh” sound is more harmonious for English speakers who are used to using “ch” and “sh” than “j” but I don’t know.
Which of course doesn’t let us off the hook for Jawarhalal but taking the a sound into the double u isn’t as easy as it looks.
Okay, that’s just off the top of my head. It doesn’t seem to occur in the middle of roots very often, but suffixes allow it to happen just about anywhere in a word - there’s no constraints on where it can occur in word in English phonetics.
Nope, not in any dialect I’m familiar with.
English is not rooted in Latin and French. While a large amount of its vocabulary can be derived either from Latin through French, or from the modern practice of combining Latin and Greek roots, the phonetic system and grammar of English are indisputably Germanic. It got its orthography from French, but quite clearly that’s changed a great deal in the intervening thousand years or so.
I’m not buying the argument that a medial J is strange to native English speakers.
“Major” comes to mind immediately. Object, subject, injure, pajamas, project, reject, eject, inject.
And numerous words with the same sound spelled differently - cager, pager, pageant, cordial, sergeant, pigeon, Bridget. And in pop-culture usage many of these words are often spelled with a J – “Majik.”
Again, hijack, but there is an “a” in between the “j” and the “w.” It seems to me that it’s much easier to parse it as ja-wa than as jaw-a, but that’s just me.
Anecdote: the delivery room nurses insisted on this pronunciation nine years ago, when Michaela was being born in a Southern California hospital.
As I recall, the instructor in our Lamaze classes was also doing this. I chalked it up to either pedantry or pedantic health-care jargon at the time, but never actually asked any of them why they were mispronouncing the word.
There’s no phonetic explanation for it. It’s simply a cultural thing - I think there’s so many French words of recent import in English that are still written and pronounced as in French that people just sort of begin to pronounce all foreign words that way. It bugs me to hear newscasters call it Beizhing, but what can you do?
“j” is one of the less-consistent letters when it comes to what it signifies in different languages, after all. I’ll remember this for the future, but I had no particular idea whether it was /ra jiv/ or /ra 3iv/.
And we’d know that how?
The mistake has perpetuated for long enough that I think it’s kind of stupid to blame people for it at this point. I’ve pronounced medial Js in Indian words as “zh” because I have never heard them said any other way. Ta da. I won’t do it anymore, but until everybody reads this very helpful thread, I suspect people will look at me funny.
I suspect people in other countries make similar mistakes about foreign languages and places.
(By the way, I’m a reporter. Not on TV. But do you think they give us classes on how to pronounce things in every language? How often do you hear newscasters nasalize the vowels in French words, unless those words are so popular that everyone knows how to say them?)
It’s common amongst healthcare workers. I’ve transcribed reports for doctors in Minnesota, Florida, and Pennsylvania, and amongst all of them are weirdos who pronounce it that way. It pissed me off, because when I was a fledgling transcriptionist, nobody told me about it and I spent ages one day searching for the word “sonometer” before I finally asked somebody.
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