Transliteration

I just came across this article on the BBC Website (Could a new phonetic alphabet promote world peace?) because it was posted in the /r/badlinguistics sub-reddit, and for good reason. It is such a remarkable mix of bad linguistics and general cluelessness that I would have thought that even with media’s generally low standards of science (especially language) reporting, something like this would not have made the cut. First of all, I am not sure why they even chose to write a whole article around this SaypU thing.

Since everyone and their grandmother is busy listening to Why this Kolaveri Di for the 4157th time in 3 days (What! You haven’t heard it yet? Get out from under that rock already!), I thought I’d write this short note on a couple of points of linguistic interest in that song. Apart from the extremely catchy tune that refuses to get out of your head even when you are asleep (I am sure loads of people have this song running like a sinister background score in their dreams), one of the things that make this song fun is of course the strongly Tamil accented English.

Well, West Bengal recently renamed itself to Poshchim Bongo (পশ্চিমবঙ্গ; pronounced [poʃtʃim bɔŋɡo]). Inhabitants of a place should have the first say about what their place is called, so I don’t see any problem there. And a community can choose whatever pronunciation they want, as I had discussed in a previous post. Of course, one would expect that it is worth the millions in taxpayer money that would be spent in the re-branding.