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ArchivesRe: Names with a meaning anotnimous with "chaste"?
in reply to a message by Getb2
Yes, sorry, should have been more precise. The same script is indeed different when used to express different languages. It would have been pretty phonetic for English too except for the Norman conquest and the great vowel shift :-) And, because of the colonial past and cultural dominance of the English language, most Indian names (in India) written in the Latin script is aiming at the English (nowadays, American) speaker. Indian names from other places (e.g., West Indies, South Africa, Fiji, etc.) sometimes target speakers with different accents.
In any case, the phonemic inventory is much larger in a typical Indian language than it is in either the Romance or the Germanic languages. As a result, when writing the names in the Latin script, important differences get lost. Moreover, since the north and south of India speak languages with very different phonemic inventories, when approximations are inevitable, they tend to go for different transliterations to emphasize the phonetic features important to their ears. And, so, you will see the same name spelt in a variety of different ways: Gita vs Geetha, Vrinda versus Brintha, etc. In each case, the difference between the native pronunciations is much smaller than would be suggested by the transliterations. In some cases, however, the differences are because the pronunciations have indeed diverged in the different languages: Robindro vs Ravindra vs Rabinder, Smruti vs Smriti, etc. And, in some cases, there are purely conventional transliterations in some parts giving us forms like Rabindra.
I tend to use a mixed upper/lower case transliteration that recalls the spelling in one of the North Indian scripts (which are more uniform and most Indian names one would familiar in the west do have a North Indian transcription), which in most cases would let people deduce its likely pronunciation in most Indian languages (with a little study, of course). I know the situation is complicated: but India is easily as diverse as Europe, and you find the same tradition in Europe. What is orthographically Angel is differently pronounced in English and Spanish, and Charles is not the same in English and France. The difference is that here everyone uses the same script (with small variations), whereas in India the scripts (and the languages) diverged rapidly since about 7th to 9th century, and none of those scripts is, I believe, familiar to most on this board.
In any case, the phonemic inventory is much larger in a typical Indian language than it is in either the Romance or the Germanic languages. As a result, when writing the names in the Latin script, important differences get lost. Moreover, since the north and south of India speak languages with very different phonemic inventories, when approximations are inevitable, they tend to go for different transliterations to emphasize the phonetic features important to their ears. And, so, you will see the same name spelt in a variety of different ways: Gita vs Geetha, Vrinda versus Brintha, etc. In each case, the difference between the native pronunciations is much smaller than would be suggested by the transliterations. In some cases, however, the differences are because the pronunciations have indeed diverged in the different languages: Robindro vs Ravindra vs Rabinder, Smruti vs Smriti, etc. And, in some cases, there are purely conventional transliterations in some parts giving us forms like Rabindra.
I tend to use a mixed upper/lower case transliteration that recalls the spelling in one of the North Indian scripts (which are more uniform and most Indian names one would familiar in the west do have a North Indian transcription), which in most cases would let people deduce its likely pronunciation in most Indian languages (with a little study, of course). I know the situation is complicated: but India is easily as diverse as Europe, and you find the same tradition in Europe. What is orthographically Angel is differently pronounced in English and Spanish, and Charles is not the same in English and France. The difference is that here everyone uses the same script (with small variations), whereas in India the scripts (and the languages) diverged rapidly since about 7th to 9th century, and none of those scripts is, I believe, familiar to most on this board.
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