The a’s are uh’s. The e’s are ay’s. The t’s are thuh’s. And on and on and on. English with an Indian twist.
It’s all fine and good if you are in India. There, everyone knows the rules of Indian English. But take those spellings out of their original cultural context, and you are left with an entire diaspora of people with mispronounced names.
Like “Sanjeev.”
In India? The “San” is pronounced “sun.” But in America? It is the “San” in “sand”, or the “San” in “sauna”. Either way, it isn’t my name. But those are the rules of the English language. And how can I expect fellow Americans to instinctively say my name in a way different from the rules of American pronounciation?
In restaurants, I tell the front desk to spell it “Sunjeev.” That way, when they call my name out, I have the pleasure of hearing it pronounced properly. I once even met a fellow Indian-American with that spelling. His parents gave him the “Sunjeev” instead of “Sanjeev” because they knew how it would be said. And since he started off that way from birth, he was used to it as well.
But for me? “Sunjeev” feels weird. I tried to get used to it once by taping the word up around my workspace. Sunjeev. Sunjeev. Sunjeev. But at the end of the day, it still looked wierd. I guess you can’t exactly expect to be comfortable changing the appearance of something as personal as your name.
But still, my name is ultimately a series of sounds. And so I have to choose between my name looking funny (“Sunjeev”) or sounding funny. I just want my name back.
1 Comment
July 25, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Nice piece. One of the problems with the English language is that the sound-symbol concord (i.e., the correspondence between the written letter and the sound of it) is not as straightforward as in, say, French or even most Indian languages. That’s one of the major reasons we Indians, brought up as we are on the written variety, have such trouble with getting our pronunciation right.