Devangari
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No, that's not a mistake.
My son just called me about some Hindi books I wanted him to order for me. He asked, "Do they have to be in Romanization, or is it all right if they are in Devangari?"
The way he said the word "Devangari" made me chuckle. Of course, with a name like Thomas Krishna Mair, and having been around me and my Sanskrit and Hindi books for the first two decades of his life, he was familiar with the word and knew that it was the script in which those languages are written.
So why did my son pronounce "Devanagari" as "Devangari"? He's not dyslexic and, indeed, has excellent elocution. Moreover, I have heard other Americans pronounce "Devanagari" as "Devangari". Still more curious, after talking with TK about the Hindi books and the script for awhile, I had to laugh at myself because, influenced by him, I actually pronounced the word as "Devangari" once or twice during our conversation. What is it about "Devanagari" that induces some English speakers to pronounce it as "Devangari"?
Others may differ, but I think it has to do with the overall configuration of the word. Confronted with a fairly long word consisting of five syllables, each of which consists of a single consonant followed by a single vowel, they seem to feel that it just doesn't have the right shape and flow. More significantly, seeing the "n" and "g" in such close proximity, and with such a plethora of vowels, it's easy to elide the middle one of the three "a's" and turn "n" + "g" into "ng", a very common phoneme in English: /ŋ/.
A variant elision, especially in the UK, is of the final "a", thus "Devanagri".
Etymology
Devanagari is a compound of "deva" देव and "nāgarī" नागरी. Deva means "heavenly or divine" and is also one of the terms for a deity in Hinduism. Nagari comes from नगरम् (nagaram), which means abode or city. Hence, Devanagari denotes from the abode of divinity or deities.
Nāgarī is the Sanskrit feminine of Nāgara "relating or belonging to a town or city, urban". It is a phrasing with lipi ("script") as nāgarī lipi "script relating to a city", or "spoken in city".
Pronunciation
/ˌdeɪvəˈnɑːɡəri/ DAY-və-NAH-gər-ee; देवनागरी, IAST: Devanāgarī, Sanskrit pronunciation: [deːʋɐˈnaːɡɐɽiː])
(Source)
Etymology
From Sanskrit देवनागरी (devanāgarī), compound of देव (deva, “deity, divine”) + नगर (nagara, “town, city”).
Pronunciation
(UK) IPA(key): /ˌdeɪvəˈnɑːɡ(ə)ɹɪ/, /ˌdɛvəˈnɑːɡ(ə)ɹɪ/
(US) IPA(key): /ˌdeɪvəˈnɑɡəɹi/
(Source)
We all have words that we only know through reading and seldom or never have a chance to hear them spoken. In such circumstances, we are apt to come up with some highly imaginative and singular pronunciations of our own.
Selected readings
- "Variant pronunciations of 'posthumous'" (6/1/19)
- "Not just more of the same" (9/4/08)
- "'Nucular' solecism traced to 200 B.C." (1/2/04)
- "Axe a stupid question" (3/21/05)
Robot Therapist said,
October 26, 2020 @ 2:25 pm
Yeah, I believe I misread it that way when I first saw it. (I'm UK-raised). And I do think it was a misreading — if I had had to write it, at that point, I would have missed out the second "a".
Sean Richardson said,
October 26, 2020 @ 2:44 pm
Also, while -ana- is not uncommon in English, spoken or written, -anag- is, far more so than -ang- … not sure that I can recall an -anag- word in this language at all, actually.
Cervantes said,
October 26, 2020 @ 2:54 pm
Americans generally pronounce unstressed vowels as schwas and frequently elide them entirely. There is a tendency over time for words that are complicated to pronounce to lose syllables, it's pretty common. Think of Wednesday. Most people say comftorbl for comfortable. (I don't know how to produce a schwa symbol, there might be one between the b and the l.) The "e" in opening is generally not pronounced. Liquid consonants generally blend omitting an intermediate vowel, e.g. "reversl" for "reversal." "Did you" can collapse entirely into a "j" sound: "Jeet yet" for "Did you eat yet." We're just lazy speakers.
Cervantes said,
October 26, 2020 @ 2:55 pm
Sean – anagram.
crturang said,
October 26, 2020 @ 3:05 pm
I would suspect that many Hindi speakers would pronounce the word like devnagri.
Victor Mair said,
October 26, 2020 @ 3:07 pm
From Max Deeg:
As a German native speaker – even without being an Indologist – I would not elide any of the vowels in Devanagari. A Hindi speaker – as you certainly know – would elide, but not as Devangari but as Devnagari (with the last a almost dropped or pronounced as a schwa).
Philip Taylor said,
October 26, 2020 @ 3:12 pm
… or "Anaglypta"
Laura Morland said,
October 26, 2020 @ 3:14 pm
You wrote: "We all have words that we only know through reading and seldom or never have a chance to hear them spoken. In such circumstances, we are apt to come up with some highly imaginative and singular pronunciations of our own."
That reminds me of an 'incident' that happened at UC Berkeley in the early 80s. I was the organizer for an 8-week seminar designed for professors of English from non-research institutions to come to UCB to study with a renowned professor (Ralph Rader, in this case). I befriended one of the beneficiaries of this grant, who confided in me that another class member had pronounced the word "awry" as "AH-ree". (Sorry, I can't reproduce IPA.)
Even though I didn't hear the mistake myself, I've never forgotten it! Still makes me smile.
Troy S. said,
October 26, 2020 @ 3:14 pm
I've been pronouncing it wromg because I assumed it was cognate with Persian نگاری (negari) for "writing."
Andrew Ollett said,
October 26, 2020 @ 3:38 pm
I've been wondering how the word and when "deva-" came to be attached to the word "nāgarī" to describe the script, which for centuries had been known simply "nāgarī."
Fred Smith said,
October 26, 2020 @ 3:58 pm
I agree with Max Deeg, that leaving out a long ā not a usual kind of elision. Confusion of long and short a/ā is normal among non-Indian language speakers, as is elision of short a at the ends of Hindi and other Modern Indo-Aryan words. I've heard North Indians regularly say devnāgarī, but never devangari. So, I suspect that Thomas Krishna simply inadvertently left the long ā out.
TKMair said,
October 26, 2020 @ 4:14 pm
Nice comments. Now I have the pleasure of relating my response to learning I've been pronouncing (and hearing in my mind) this word incorrectly all this time. While it's a word I've seldom used or encountered, the way I had thought it sounded equated to a certain meaning for me. BUT! The right pronunciation brings a totally new thought to my very non-historical and non-linguistic sciences mind. More anecdotally, and mystic minded, *Devanagari* sounds like "Divine Augery" to me. So much that when Victor pronounced it the first few times to me, my eyebrows definitely popped upwards with surprise. A linguistic coincidence no doubt, or is it…
TKMair said,
October 26, 2020 @ 4:25 pm
@Fred Smith, bingo!
ktschwarz said,
October 26, 2020 @ 4:33 pm
-anag- is in "manage" and all the words derived from it. Also "tanager" and some rare technical words such as "anagenesis".
Victor Mair said,
October 26, 2020 @ 4:35 pm
From Philip Lutgendorf:
Thanks, Victor, for this enjoyable posting. You may be right about why this particular transposition/alteration is made by English speakers. But note also the American tendency, in multisyllable Indian words, to stress (perhaps on the model of Italian words?) the penultimate syllable, resulting in e.g. “Raa-ma-YAAH-nah” and “Mahaa-ba-RAA-tah.”
Another transposition that has long intrigued me is spelling Gandhi’s name “Ghandi” (which my students did constantly). I assume that the problem is a) difficulty in conceptualizing an aspirated d, and b) the name of the country “Ghana.”
Victor Mair said,
October 26, 2020 @ 4:47 pm
From Carol Kennedy:
Actually, my dad* always pronounced it as “De-va-NA-ga-ri” with the emphasis on the syllable that TK omitted. Not sure if this was correct, but he was possibly the only person I ever heard even talking about the script, and that was the way he pronounced it.
Any correction to this is most welcome, of course.
When we were in Poona in 1959-60, I actually learned to read the script and learned a few words (and the numbers) in Hindi. But mostly I studied French there, with a friend of my parents who hailed from Ütrecht!
[*VHM: Leigh Lisker, Professor of Linguistics at Penn, specializing in phonetics and Dravidian languages.]
Crystal said,
October 26, 2020 @ 6:25 pm
This reminds me of all the English speakers who invent "romanji" when learning Japanese.
David Marjanović said,
October 26, 2020 @ 8:15 pm
And indeed I've seen it written that way, with all the short vowels dropped out.
BTW, in the Sanskrit chanting I've heard, e is definitely not [eː], but [ɛː]. (Indeed, i sometimes comes out as [e], short of course.)
Andreas Johansson said,
October 27, 2020 @ 1:46 am
I realize I've been mentally mispronouncing it myself, with penultimate stress (but with the right number of syllables). Dunno if I've ever had reason to say it out loud, or heard anyone else do so.
Michael Watts said,
October 27, 2020 @ 2:01 am
I learned that the word was pronounced devnagri from… wikipedia, back when the pronunciation was indicated in the article. (You can see this being done, for example, in versions from 2013, if you look at the history of the page.)
I'm intrigued that they felt it was necessary to remove this information.
This makes no sense. All of these examples use /dʒ/, and the letter "g" is always followed by "e". This cannot be the pronunciation used for "devanagari", where the letter following "g" is "a"; none of these could be taken as a model for what to do with "devanagari".
Luke B said,
October 27, 2020 @ 3:45 am
This is a very refreshing change from Twitter, which is full of humblebrags from academics about how their three-year-old just accidentally reinvented calculus. "Should I be impressed that my kid just wrote a symphony?"
Michael Vnuk said,
October 27, 2020 @ 5:06 am
Philip Lutgendorf said (as reported in a comment from Victor Mair):
Another transposition that has long intrigued me is spelling Gandhi’s name “Ghandi” (which my students did constantly). I assume that the problem is a) difficulty in conceptualizing an aspirated d, and b) the name of the country “Ghana.”
I've also seen that transposition a few times. I don't buy the 'aspirated d' theory. Lots of words have an H in their spelling that means something for people who know the source language, eg 'Bhutan', 'chemist', 'dharma', 'rhetoric', 'Thailand', 'Phnom Penh' (2 Hs), 'khan', 'Lhasa', 'what', but the standard pronunciation effectively ignores the H.
I think that people remember the letters in 'Gandhi', and know that there is an H that doesn't affect pronunciation, so they join it to the most likely letter, the G, as in 'ghost' and 'ghetto', plus all the various 'ough' words.
Vasu Renganathan said,
October 27, 2020 @ 7:03 am
Perhaps, Surendra Gambhir can shed more light on this. I always thought Dēvanākari is the script (lipi) of the ancient divine people of Nākar (people of Serpents – http://www.nagar.org/evolution_of_nagars.html). The suffix 'i' is the possessive suffix to mean 'of/belonging to'. This suffix is common in other Indian languages as well referring to scripts. Tamil-Brahmi script, for instance, was once called tamiḻi during the medieval times. I doubt that Nagari (Nākari) comes from नगरम् (nagaram), which means abode or city. Nagaram is a commonly borrowed word in other Indian languages, including Tamil.
cameron said,
October 27, 2020 @ 9:47 am
The tendency in English to transliterate foreign words without distinguishing between short and long 'a' sounds is very annoying. When I encounter an unfamiliar place-name, or proper noun in general, I will often flip to the relevant Persian wikipedia page to see how to pronounce it. The irony of that is that Persian generally doesn't indicate vowels at all – in fact, the way the script is usually used, the only vowels that are clearly marked are those long 'a' sounds. So I'm relying on a script that notoriously doesn't indicate vowels to disambiguate the pronunciation of words that I've encountered in a script in a language that could disambiguate those sounds, but can't be bothered to.
Native English speakers don't confuse generally the short and long 'a' sounds. No-one mispronounces "father" with the vowel from "fat". Why has there historically been no effort made to distinguish those sounds when transliterating foreign words? There are occasional exceptions. Most Indian restaurants write "naan" rather than "nan" to indicate that menu item. But I suspect that reflects the initiative of native Indic speakers trying to get the English speakers not to mangle the word. I suspect most native English speakers would have happily written the word as "nan" until the end of time, with the attendant mispronunciation, because they just don't see that distinction as making a difference.
Michael Watts said,
October 27, 2020 @ 12:23 pm
Most likely because foreign words are extremely unlikely to use the sound [æ]. It's not that we transcribe both vowels the same way; it's that "a" is used for the vowel of "father" and nothing is used for the vowel of "fat" because that issue never arises.
For reference, if you're referring to the vowel of "fat" as "short a", the corresponding "long a" is the vowel of "fate", not that of "father". If you're referring to the vowel of "father" as "long a", the corresponding "short a" would be a similar vowel, but of shorter duration.
cameron said,
October 27, 2020 @ 3:13 pm
I was referring to the TRAP vowel as contrasted with the PALM vowel.
Consider the name "Afghanistan" – it would be pronounced, in Persian. Dari, or Pashtu, with something almost exactly like the English TRAP vowel in the first syllable, and something almost exactly like the English PALM vowel in both the second and final syllables. The way it's written in English prompts almost all Americans to pronounce it with the TRAP vowel in all three cases. President Obama always pronounced "Pakistan" correctly (PALM vowel first and last), apparently because a friend of his at college was from that country and taught him how to say it properly. I remember hearing Indians marvel aloud at Obama's pronunciation of Pakistan – they'd never heard an American politician say it correctly before. For some reason, President Obama was unable to extrapolate from this and guess that the final syllable in Afghanistan should be pronounced the same way.
Michael Watts said,
October 27, 2020 @ 3:23 pm
As I mentioned, there is no terminological system that refers to TRAP as "short a" and PALM as "long a". In the standard terminology, TRAP is indeed "short a" while PALM is "short o". (As in "moss".)
The system of spelling foreign words is pretty simple — "a" always indicates the PALM vowel, and never indicates the TRAP vowel. (See https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2863 , in fact, highlighting the '"a in foreign words" norm'.)
Pronunciation with TRAP indicates that the word is nativized.
Terry K. said,
October 27, 2020 @ 3:46 pm
Cameron, how foreign sounds compart to TRAP and PALM and other English language phonemes depends on which English language accent. And American TRAP is rarely a good match for any sound in another language.
cameron said,
October 27, 2020 @ 4:23 pm
I referred to the lexical classes rather than actual sounds precisely to abstract away from specific accents.
English TRAP (/æ/ across most varieties) happens to very closely match a basic vowel in Persian, hence my example of place names derived from that language. Hindi/Urdu and Punjabi speakers render my example of "Afghanistan" pretty much the same way it's pronounced in Persian (they might shorten the first vowel a bit, depending on the speaker) – they might not have the [æ] vowel used in the initial syllable as part of their native language's phonology, but they have it for borrowed foreign words (and they have no shortage of borrowed English and Persian words)
Philip Taylor said,
October 28, 2020 @ 3:43 am
Michael — ' PALM is "short o". (As in "moss") '. But "moss" has the LOT vowel, does it not ?
Chris Button said,
October 28, 2020 @ 6:37 am
@ Michael Watts, Philip Taylor, Cameron,
It seems the confusion is coming from your different dialects (whichever they may be).
For example, it's confusing that British English /æ/ is more of an [a] sound nowadays than American [æ]. Hence what may be a suitable approximation of a foreign sound for British ears might not be so for Americans.
Terry K. said,
October 28, 2020 @ 8:44 am
@Philip Taylor
For me, American, "moss" most definitely does not have the same vowel as "lot" (and LOT). "Lot", unrounded, same vowel as "father". (My impression is those would not be the same for any British speakers.) Moss has a rounded vowel.
And "palm" seems an odd word choice for a vowel set because it can be pronounced more than one way (in American English).
It seems to me like the more open vowels have a lot of variation between different accents of English, and the closed vowels much less.
cameron said,
October 28, 2020 @ 11:17 am
Dialect variation in how these phonemes are pronounced in English aside, if most English speakers default to [æ], or some variation thereof, when encountering a foreign word spelled with 'a', and [æ] is quite rare among the worlds languages, then why is the letter 'a', all by itself, so commonly used in transliterating foreign words?
Christopher Blanchard said,
October 29, 2020 @ 1:45 pm
Several (UK) English pronunciations use a short a (as TRAP) for the word father. As some Yorkshire, especially south, and north Nottinghamshire. So:
'Tha's reet father', for 'You are right (either 'correct' or 'doing well') father'.
Chas Belov said,
November 4, 2020 @ 3:22 pm
Not that I've ever said it aloud or think it often but I've always thought it in my head as "Devangari" (with separate "n" and "g" phonemes) and this is the first I've been aware I've been thinking it wrong.