Annoying Vowels

(I had another post drafted, waiting in the wings, but my increasing frustration with IHUM led me to publish this one.)

In Visions of Mortality, we’re currently reading the Bhagavad-Gita, a tiny (yet pithy) excerpt of the Mahabharata, a colossal Sanskrit epic of familial strife and redemption. It’s an engaging, interesting, and enlightening tale, but longer than the Odyssey and Iliad combined. I had the fortune of being exposed to the televised version as a kid. True, it was over 72 hours long, but it’s probably faster than reading. In any case, I was exposed to it in Hindi, so all my knowledge of pronunciation was based off native pronunciation schemes.

Fast forward nine-ish years. In my hands lie the English translation of the Bhagavad-Gita and to my horror, I find most of the names are appended with a rather annoying -a. From what I’ve been taught, however, the final -a is rarely pronounced. So while most Americans pronounce “Arjuna” in three syllables, virtually all Indians would sound it as “Arjun.” It’s a pattern prominent in all male names, so today I thought I would look into this puzzling problem.

One thing to keep in mind is that the epic was originally written in Sanskrit. As I discovered, Sanksrit has a general convention whereby when a noun ends in a consonant, a schwa (short neutral vowel) follows it. There are exceptions, most notably when the original word ends in a long vowel. However, as Hindi slowly evolved from Sanskrit, it dropped the schwa entirely from Sanskrit loan words. This is the pronunciation I learned, and it’s the way an entire subcontinent pronounces it. If that’s the case, then why does this problem exist in the first place?

Well, as early as 1816, there has been interest in Romanizing and transliteration Sanskrit from the Devanagari script. As you can imagine, the vowels and consonants didn’t exactly match up, so several different schemes have been proposed. The current de facto standard is from the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST), which uses special characters to provide lossless transliteration of sounds (sample: yogaścittavṛttinirodhaḥ), making it difficult to learn and type. Two other popular transliteration methods are Indian languages TRANSliteration (ITRANS) and Harvard-Kyoto (HK). Both of these, however, use capital letters, which can create confusion when writing names (ITRANS sample: yogashchittavR^ittinirodhaH; HK sample: yogazcittavRttinirodhaH). Both of these have the upshot of being keyboard friendly though.

People crave ease of use, however, so approximations using the Latin alphabet and English pronunciation have been attempted (sample: yogash chitta-vritti-nirodhah). This has, in my experience, led to two problems: first, highly inconsistent transliteration patterns; and two, the now-redundant schwa. With Latin transliteration, this short vowel is symbolized by an -a appended to a noun. For the Western reader, however, this gives the false impression of a short a sound following every masculine noun, for both Sanskrit and Sanskrit loan words in Hindi. Hinduism has a long tradition, so many people and place names have roots in Sanskrit and now are Romanized with an extra -a. The end result? Frustration and anguish for native speakers like myself.

This brings up a larger consideration: Sanskrit is a dead language, so should it be Latinized from it’s original pronunciation or from it’s de facto standard Hindi pronunciation? Before you jump on the notion of preservation-for-preservation’s sake, I’d like to remind you of how many Latin names have been Anglicized. After all, who among us actually pronounces Caesar as /ky-sar/ and Cicero as /kee-ker-o/?

Languages change, pronunciations shift, and humans keep up with it. Unfortunately, the overwhelming tradition of transliteration has placed the -a in a position where I can’t see it ever disappearing. So it falls on us to make sure we’re pronouncing words, in any language, correctly. At the very least it’s a sign of education, and at the most it’s pure respect.

Further reading:
Wikipedia article on transliterating Sanskrit
Detail of difficulties with Hindi pronunciation (scroll down to right before the chart)
Comparing different systems Sanskrit of transliteration
The Encyclopedia of Authentic Hinduism, which employs a revised and more accurate system of transliteration