Is there a finite number of pronunciations for anything?

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Below is a guest post by Corey Miller.


Azi Paybarah of the Washington Post quoted Trump as follows:

“There’s about 19 different ways of pronouncing it, right,” Trump said falsely, during a speech in Michigan on Thursday. “But Kamala is, at least it’s a name you sort of remember.”

The most interesting part of this to me is the assertion that it was a false claim. I suppose the intuition is that there are two common ways to stress Kamala, either initially/antepenultimately or medially/penultimately, so that Trump's "nineteen" is clearly hyperbolic.

What do we mean when we speak of a number of pronunciations for a word? One interpretation might be “how many ways can we represent the pronunciation of a word, as spoken by a fluent speaker interpreting the phonemes of a relevant variety of the language in question?”. Under this interpretation, three American English pronunciations of Kamala come to mind:

1. ˈkɑmələ
2. ˈkæmələ
3. kəˈmɑlə

Pronunciation 1 seems to be how the Vice President pronounces her own name and the preference of a majority of younger speakers at the Democratic National Convention. Pronunciation 2 is one I hadn’t considered, but noticed it was very popular among older speakers at the DNC; it seems to be on analogy with Pamela, which to my knowledge has only 1 pronunciation under the definition above. I assume Pronunciation 2 wouldn’t be considered an affront in the way Pronunciation 3 is, but this could be investigated further. As a final note on Prounciation 2, it is related to an interesting phenomenon I first read about in an article by Geoff Lindsey and that was further developed in my classmate Charles Boberg’s dissertation and discussed more recently by him here.

Pronunciation 3 seems to be the preferred pronunciation used by those seeking to needle the Vice President, but it seems like it can be used “innocently enough” given the predilection for penultimate stress in such words as suggested by the English Stress Rule as formulated in Liberman & Prince and elsewhere. For example, Malala (Yousufzai) seems to be a name that we hear uniquely with something like Pronunciation 3.

There is another pronunciation noted occasionally in the press for Kamala that is more “native” to the Sanskrit origins of the name, meaning “lotus flower”. Using standard American English phonemes and their IPA labels, this might be something like Pronunciation 4:

4. ˈkʌmələ

The first syllable could just as easily have been transcribed with a stressed schwa by those who admit such things. [ɐ] is used in the Sanskrit etymon for all vowels in the word in Wiktionary. This phenomenon of the “Indic short a” is also encountered in words like pundit and Punjab which are sometimes written as pandit and Panjab.

So, are there only four pronunciations? There are certainly other possibilities using IPA interpretations for various varieties of English, American and otherwise. The letter 'a' can also of course be pronounced as [ej], but perhaps using such a pronunciation in Kamala would be considered particularly outrageous. But maybe it could occur in the speech of someone less familiar with English, or someone learning to read?

Of course,  there are indefinitely many pronunciations, if we consider "pronunciations" as the articulatory and acoustic signals implementing a word, rather than IPA-ish symbols. But I assume the lay view of what it means to be a pronunciation is more along the lines of the IPA alternatives I gave above, and this is reflected in a long line of pronunciation dictionaries like Kenyon & Knott or indeed the curious symbols used in American dictionaries.

In summary, I think Mr. Paybarah was right to call Mr. Trump’s claim of 19 pronunciations false; but I think it could be litigated…


Above is a guest post by Corey Miller.



31 Comments »

  1. Anonymous said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 11:44 am

    The name "Kamala" is generally pronounced something like kʌmə'lɑ:(or kʌm'lɑ:) in India. The Sanskrit would be कमला kamalā (in the feminine) with a long "a" in the end, rather than कमल kamala.

  2. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 12:04 pm

    It seems reasonably likely that parents who were UC-Berkeley grad students in 1964 had "Kamala" mediated to them from Sanskrit via Hermann Hesse's novel _Siddhartha_,* in which it is the name of the "female lead" that the title character falls in love with. I believe many landlords in Berkeley in 1964 required any apartment rented by grad students to have at least three or four Hesse titles in paperback on hand in order to comply with local zoning rules. Which might raise the question of how it's pronounced in Hesse's German. Although I guess the better question would be how American grad students would pronounce an intended-to-seem-Indian name found in an English translation of a German novel, which is probably not the same thing.

    I'm pretty sure that I first heard the name aloud as sung identifying the eighth woman named in the lyrics of the Eighties semi-novelty underground semi-hit "88 Lines About 44 Women." The pronunciation is pretty close to this posts option #1, but you can assess for yourself around 1:01 of this youtube version. (The band released a few different performances of the song over the years** and I haven't checked if the pronunciation is consistent.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Iwspf5L1Qk

    Finally, I would suggest that in addition to possible influence (or interference) from "Pamela" the other more common-in-the-US female given name that people might subconsciously drawn on by analogy is "Carmela." Especially for non-rhotic speakers!

    *I read the novel (in paperback, of course) as a high school student circa 1980, which was probably at the very tail-end of Hesse's popularity among American young people.

    **the wikipedia article on the song says only two versions but they might wrong about that

  3. KeithB said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 12:33 pm

    I think that the false claim is that there are 19 ways to pronounce it *correctly*, hinging on whether that comma before right is there or not.

  4. Barbara Phillips Long said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 12:37 pm

    Is there a recording of Trump talking about the 19 different ways? I am wondering about the reporter’s transcription — was the phrase have a pause before “righr” or was there no pause, as in “19 different ways of pronouncing it right.”

    People don’t like to have their names mispronounced, and more often now even a first-time mispronunciation is viewed as a microaggression. There is no authoritative dictionary providing pronunciations for names in American English, and novelty spellings and new names can be challenging, as I discovered when working as a substitute teacher.

    The generally accepted standard i have seen is one more based in etiquette than in linguistics, where the person whose name it is specifies the pronunciation. While there are indeed multiple ways to pronounce Kamala, Donald Trump is evading the crux of the matter, which is that the specific person, Kamala Harris, can have a specific and preferred pronunciation that does not have multiple variants. He can ask her what she prefers, and then he can use that pron

  5. David L said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 12:41 pm

    What qualifies as a genuine difference in pronunciation, as opposed to regional variation in vowels? For example, 'Anna' can be heard in at least two versions, which I loosely think of as east coast and west coast, but the people making those pronunciations may reasonably think they are saying the name the same way, per their own idiolect. Similarly with versions 1 and 2 of Kamala.

  6. Mark Liberman said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 1:02 pm

    @KeithG: "I think that the false claim is that there are 19 ways to pronounce it *correctly*, hinging on whether that comma before right is there or not."

    Here's the audio (source), which makes it clear FWIW that the "right" is a tag question:

  7. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 1:02 pm

    Fortunately, people who wish to be negative about the candidate while deferring to her own preferred pronunciation (#1) are already capitalizing on the wordplay made possible by the fact that pronunciation #1 makes the first syllable homophonous for AmEng speakers with the first syllable of "communist" and "commie" etc. Whereas pronunciation #2's first syllable is homophonous with that of "Cammie," which is a reasonably common and non-pejorative female nickname, short I think for several different full/legal names.

  8. Ambarish Sridharanarayanan said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 1:12 pm

    So many things to unpack here.

    @J.W. Brewer. Harris's mother is a TamBrahm. Kamala is an incredibly common name in the TamBrahm community. I have 3 people in my extended family with that name. Harris's name has nothing to do with her parents having been in Cal.

    As Anonymous says, her name isn't the same word as the name for the lotus flower, with is kamalam. Her name is kamalā, which is an epithet of Lakshmi; this is traditionally derived as kamala ‍+ ac + tāp, through kamalam asyāstīti kamalaḥ, strītvāṭṭāp । The English translation is that Lakshmi is termed kamalā as she has a lotus-flower (that she sits on).

    Where Anonymous goes a bit sideways is in a couple of ways. For starters, the /kʌmlɑ:/ pronunciation only happens in languages with schwa-deletion, which is irrelevant here as Shyamala Gopalan Harris spoke Tamil natively which doesn't do schwa-deletion.

    Also, modern Indian languages do not do syllabic stress the same way American English does. Harris herself pronounces her name with syllabic stress, but the traditional Tamil pronunciation would be something like /kɜmɜläː/, where the syllabic stress is variable.

  9. Coby said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 1:43 pm

    There is a general tendency in the Anglosphere to stress unfamiliar polysyllabic words that end in a vowel (not spelled y) on the penultimate, regardless of how they are stressed in the original language, unless they have the ending -ica or -ico. This happens with other words if Indian origin, such as mandala or basmati, and others such as paprika, Bacardí (despite the acute accent) and hundreds more.

  10. GH said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 1:50 pm

    @Ambarish Sridharanarayanan:

    While I initially read J.W. Brewer the same way you did, on a second take I do not think they're suggesting that the Vice President's parents got the name out of Hesse, but merely that there could be other Kamalas whose parents took the name from his novel. If those Kamalas then use some other pronunciation, we would have to count it among the possible correct English pronunciations of the name.

    I could also imagine some speakers rendering it (presumably in all cases incorrectly) as Camilla.

  11. Garrett Wollman said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 2:21 pm

    Back in June, a BBC presenter tweeted a video in which they discussed this whole issue (apparently, pace John Nance Garner, the vice-president is not normally important enough to teach BBC presenters how to pronounce their name, but once they become a front-runner for the presidency it's a different story) and they actually got into the one noticeable transpondian dialectical difference: the campaign was using a pronunciation respelling "COMMA-la", but of course the first vowel in "coimma" (Wells's LOT lexical set) is pronounced differently in AmE and BrE. The video explained that the BBC had settled on a more imitative pronunciation, using their PALM vowel, rather than LOT (or, presumably, TRAP, the usual SEEngE realization of "foreign A", although I don't recall whether they mentioned that).

  12. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 2:28 pm

    If you look at the frequency of "Kamala" as a given name in the U.S. by year of birth it has not risen with the dramatic increase in immigration from India over the last 60 years but instead has fallen dramatically, along with the readership of Hermann Hesse. So however common name it may remain in India for some specific subset of the population, that has not yet been reflected in the child-naming practices of the American diaspora. If both of the Vice President's parents had been immigrants from India I would be more likely to default to the assumption that her year of birth coinciding with apparently-Hesse-related Peak Kamala in American baby-naming practices was a pure coincidence. It still might be, of course. But of all the potential girls' names common in "TamBrahm" circles, why happent o pick the specific one that was enjoying a certain vogue among Americans of other ethnic origins at the time, a vogue that seems reasonably likely to have been concentrated among the specific demographic subset of Americans that these immigrant parents were living among?

    Here are the stats of Kamalas-born-per-year in the U.S. per the Social Security Administration's massive database, starting with the Vice President's year of birth and then at 10-year intervals, except stopping with 2023 because we obviously don't have full-year 2024 stats yet:

    1964: 105
    1974: 35
    1984: 13
    1994: 8
    2004: 10
    2014: 10
    2023: 7

  13. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 2:41 pm

    There are at least two different variables here: first-syllable stress versus second-syllable stress (with the latter predictably leading to a reduced vowel in the first syllable) and what vowel is used in a stressed first syllable. For the first one, are there any even modestly-common English words with a stressed first syllable spelled cam- or kam- that have in general AmEng the LOT/PALM vowel rather than the TRAP/BATH vowel? Obviously personal names especially those of foreign origin can be and are idiosyncratic, but it may be useful to understand just how strong the push toward a spelling pronunciation like #2 in myl's list is or isn't.

    I do think there are some more common given names that have LOT/PALM in their stressed first syllable that many Americans naturally/unconsciously realize with TRAP/BATH without intent to give offense even if they've had the "correct" pronunciation modeled for them by the specific individual. Caterina/Katerina might be a good example. Bearers of such names living in the U.S. need to make their own decisions about how hard to push back versus tolerate the seemingly "natural" Americanized pronunciation. "Kamala" is rare enough that people are less likely to be influenced by people already having a specific default pronunciation associated with it, of course.

  14. Terry K. said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 4:39 pm

    I liked this video from Dr Geoff Lindsey on YouTube.

    https://youtu.be/NihLE-wh0xc?si=GLhFdWL1dZceyWRm (Why for some it's not easy for some to pronounce KAMALA!)

    He first talks about the different pronunciations by Americans, concludes that, if looking for the correct pronunciation, for Americans, pronounce it as she does. And then he goes into why it's not that simple for British English speakers, that the vowel Americans use there doesn't neatly map onto one particular British English vowel.

  15. Jonathan Smith said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 8:52 pm

    ^ Good video. A TL;DR version might be "it's just not realistic to expect people to use a sound from outside their own phonetic system whenever they say one particular word or name" — from Lindsay's lips to the ears of the commentariat (including its linguistic wings) let's hope.

    This relates not just to the first syllable of "Kamala" in the UK but in the US as well since, while /æ/ is clearly the "wrong" choice, some people's merged low back vowels (*cough*) can also seem "wrong" to those with a separate and/or less backround /ɑ/.

  16. Jonathan Smith said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 8:52 pm

    *Lindsey

  17. Nathan said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 9:47 pm

    Fascinating! I'm one of the Americans who have been mystified at the inability of British speakers to pronounce the VP's name (Why don't they just say, "Karmala"?). I had been under the misapprehension that English had lost vowel-length distinctions.

  18. Chris Button said,

    September 14, 2024 @ 11:17 am

    Great video. Well explained. Although, i'm not sure I agree with what he said about phonetic vowel length in American English (or its lack thereof).

  19. David Marjanović said,

    September 14, 2024 @ 12:51 pm

    i'm not sure I agree with what he said about phonetic vowel length in American English (or its lack thereof)

    First he says it's gone, then he says it's no longer distinctive. The latter is right – comma, hockey and such are a lot longer in AmE than in BrE, but the phoneme is allowed to appear in shortening contexts (like trisyllabic words), and there its length disappears without further ado, while BrE perceives a contradiction there.

  20. Andrew Usher said,

    September 14, 2024 @ 1:58 pm

    He means no contradiction; he explains clearly that what he means is that Americans don't have two different categories of 'short' and 'long' vowels. So, all vowels can equally be lengthened and shortened in suitable positions. He even gives an example in another video: for him 'father' is long and 'gather' short, while Americans say them with the same intermediate length, because they are in the same environment. We also associate stress with length, which is why the correct anglicisation of the Indian form would have final-syllable stress, /kʌmə'lɑ:/ as the first commenter correctly noted, even if the source doesn't have recognisable stress

    The 'Kamala' video also shows examples of /kəˈmælə/, certainly another pronunciation choice. But of course Trump's claim wasn't literal, he didn't mean 19 as an exact count of anything, the only factual element was that 'Kamala' doesn't have one universally accepted English pronunciation (which is true) unlike, say, his name 'Donald'.

  21. Chris Button said,

    September 14, 2024 @ 3:34 pm

    Americans don't have two different categories of 'short' and 'long' vowels

    But Americans do phonetically (albeit contrasting in quality as well as quantity). Same as Brits in that general regard without going into specifics.

    Just a minor quibble. The detailed part of his analysis pertaining to this situation seems fine though.

  22. Chester Draws said,

    September 14, 2024 @ 3:50 pm

    There's very obvious variants left out.

    Living with plenty of Polynesians, my first instinct with names that are of the alternating consonant – vowel type I have not seen before is to pronounce them with short vowels and no stress. Also I tend to say each vowel, not schwa.

    I suspect that if you went to American Samoa you might find a lot of people pronounce it with no stress and/or actually saying the vowels.

  23. Bloix said,

    September 14, 2024 @ 4:34 pm

    When Harris first appeared on national scene, people tended to say her name "Ka-MAL-ah. After 3 and 1/2 years of her Vice Presidency, people gotten over that, but Trump is reaching back to a timewhen her name seemed odd and foreign. This "nineteen ways" bit isn't about minor vowel differences, is about "what kind of name is named "Kamala?"

    A while back there was a post and threat of comments at Language Hat, arising from the complaint of a reader named is Anand, correctly pronounced AH-nund, but often mispronounced in the US as ANN-nnd (his phonetic transcriptions.) He called this a "dispronunciation," and compares it to what he feels was the mispronunciations of Kamala, which he believeed is intentionally insulting.

    https://languagehat.com/dispronunciation/

    Unlike Anand, Kamala Harris made a decision years ago to standardize a pronounciation of her name that is close enough to accurate and is easy for Americans. Before she became famous enough not to have deal with the problem, she would introduce herself to an audience or a new acquaintance, "it's COMMA -la, like the punctuation make plus La." This results in a pronunciation that is close enough not be insulting. After you hear COMMA-la, if you get it wrong, it's because you're, you're trying.

    Kamala Harris has been Vice President of the United States for almost four years now. Trump certainly knows how to say her name, but he likes to imply that she's not quite a real American and she's not honest about her origins. He can't run the birth certificate gambit again, but he can make fun of her name, just as he mocked Nikki Haley's name. https://apnews.com/article/trump-nikki-haley-58b7ffa7e49f626bae481060cf9975d2

    PS- I often stop in at a coffee shop whose new owner called Ashur. When he took over I asked him his name, which at first gave me trouble – I once called him ASH-er, and he said – it's Ah-SHOOR, and you can be SURE you'll always get good coffee here. I've had no trouble since then.

  24. Jonathan Smith said,

    September 14, 2024 @ 5:42 pm

    Re: linguistically transplanted names, if at one end are naive/ignorant/malicious/spelling-based/etc. mispronunciations, and at the other is the pronunciation(s) in the language(s) of origin, then the middle is COMma-luh, ah-SHOOR, sung-WON (obligatory classic ProZD skit), etc. — that is, the phonetically "naturalized" version, generally devised (if subconsciously) by the eponymous individual themselves by reference to some level of heritage awareness of the language of origin + (often native) competence in the language of the new environment (above American English), among other factors.

    But there is not much popular awareness of this "middle level." Instead the general impression that there is just "right" or "wrong", and that in saying e.g. sung-WON I am "right" and uh pretty much speaking Korean. But not.

  25. Seonachan said,

    September 14, 2024 @ 8:51 pm

    As a native of eastern Massachusetts with a rounded LOT vowel, I was initially thrown off by the "COMMA-la" explanation. It took me a minute to say it in my head with a General American accent.

  26. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 15, 2024 @ 8:27 am

    I again deny the premise that "Kamala" is a "foreign" name rather than a statistically rare American name. I would wager some modest amount of money that if some investigative journalist went out and tracked down a reasonable sample of the 104 other US-born women named Kamala also born and named in 1964 (which would be a good project leading to a potentially entertaining read, I should think) they would predominantly turn out to be white women born to non-immigrant parents. Now, it might well be that her parents gave her a name that simultaneously evoked an "old country" name for her mother's side of the family but also sounded like a trendy new name for 1964-born California girls. That could have been a perfectly sensible naming strategy for immigrant parents to pursue.

    Consider the one other datapoint we have on her parents' naming practices. When the Vice-President's younger sister Maya Harris was born in 1967, "Maya" was not a common American girls' name – only 45 instances that year of birth in the SSA database, which is one fewer than "Kamala" had for that year. But Maya proved to be a name on the move. It first entered the top 1000 names for newly-born American girls in 1970 and has risen so steadily in popularity since then that in 2023 in broke into the top 50 for the first time, with 4,067 baby girls given that name last year. Maya is a name with antecedents in a variety of ethnicities and languages, but one of them is South Asian, at least according to wikipedia which advises me that Māyā (in addition to naming a theological concept that might seem rather pejorative) is "an alternate name of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi." And indeed the full name of the Vice-President's sister is Maya Lakshmi Harris, which seems (if wikipedia is right) unlikely to be a complete coincidence.

    Tentative conclusion: the parents did not intend to give one daughter a "popular" name and the other an "exotic" name, or one a "normal-sounding" name and the other a "foreign-sounding" name. Rather, they were trying to pick au-courant-sounding California names for both of them that also both had some South Asian resonance. (Or vice versa, if you like, in terms of the relative priority of the South-Asian angle and the Californian angle.) It only appears that one is "normal" and the other "exotic" in hindsight, but no one could have predicted ex ante that one name would prosper in the long run and the other fade quickly in frequency of use after a brief boomlet.

    Bonus pronunciation angle: AFAIK there is these days really only one pronunciation of the given name "Maya" in AmEng, which is /ˈmaɪə/. I can't consciously recall hearing the semi-obvious spelling-pronunciation alternative /ˈmeɪə/, by analogy to the month of May – sometimes used as a given name – or the now vaguely-archaic female given name Mae. But I don't know if it was ever thus, or whether the popularity of the name has led to standardization more recently. Back around 1975 I had an elementary school classmate who was one of the tiny handful of mid-Sixties-born American Mayas, and I think she was /ˈmaɪə/ not /ˈmeɪə/, but I can't rule out the possibility that my memory is fuzzy and I'm retrojecting current usage back into the distant past.

    Final bonus: The Vice President's own full name is Kamala Devi Harris. Her Indic-origin middle name is doing better these days as a first name, with 2023's crop of US-born baby girls having 50 Devis compared to 7 Kamalas. That's up from 16 Devis born a decade earlier in 2013. I'm not in a position to say to what extent these recently-born Devis are the daughters of Indian-American families versus born to parents of other ethnic backgrounds looking for a lesser-used name.

  27. Philip Taylor said,

    September 15, 2024 @ 8:45 am

    JWB — "AFAIK there is these days really only one pronunciation of the given name "Maya" in AmEng, which is /ˈmaɪə/" — is that same pronunciation as used in <Am.E> as for the south-American civilisation of that name ?

  28. Rodger C said,

    September 15, 2024 @ 10:38 am

    Well, when I was a young sprout, "Maya" as in Yucatan was pronounced "MAY-uh" in AmEng. A few years ago I heard it in an old film, triggering a shock of recognition.

  29. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 15, 2024 @ 12:46 pm

    @Philip T.:: I would have answered your question "yes" (subject to quibbling about South America v. Central …) but Rodger C.'s comment indicates that my own experience may not be complete and definitive. I believe Rodger C. is 17 years older than I am, to put our relative recollections in context.

  30. RfP said,

    September 15, 2024 @ 5:27 pm

    I’ll step in here, Philip, as an “old” (born the early fifties) and as an all-but-native Californian (I am firmly convinced that my parents, who moved to Detroit shortly after they were married and then right back when I was three, did so primarily so that I couldn’t just say I was born here).

    Everybody I’ve ever known has always pronounced the name of that civilization the way JW would have expected.

  31. Erik said,

    September 24, 2024 @ 7:47 pm

    I always wonder how much effect the character Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel) has on how people pronounce Kamala Harris's, given that the superhero's name *is* pronounced kəˈmɑlə. I mean, I know only a million or so people watched the show, but that's not nothing.

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