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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.