Murder most foul! How ‘Kanimozhi’ is being mangled

Facing a media scrum outside the Patiala House courts in New Delhi soon after Kanimozhi’s bail application was dismissed on Friday, the CBI’s lawyer revelled in his Fifteen Minutes of Fame – and showed himself up to be a cunning linguist. [caption id=“attachment_13201” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Kanimozhi in Tamil (or, more correctly, Tamizh) means ‘Sweet Language’, but the multifarious ways in which her name was mangled this evening was, to a Tamil ear, far from sweet. Image from Reuters.”] [/caption] First in Hindi (at the media’s request) and then in English, he gamely gave his less-than-scintillating opinion on the judge’s order. But polyglot though he manifestly was, he couldn’t get his tongue to perform the nimble Dravidian acrobatics required of it to pronounce Kanimozhi’s name right. “Kanimoji,” he said repeatedly, unabashed about committing nomenclatural murder live on television. As if adding a respectful ji- suffix could be mitigation of any sort… Across television channels, correspondents and anchors similarly stumbled, or opted instead for other traditional but incorrect approximations of unpronounceable Tamil names. Kanimozhi in Tamil (or, more correctly, Tami_zh_) means ‘Sweet Language’, but the multifarious ways in which her name was mangled this evening was, to a Tamil ear, far from sweet. The troublesome bit is, of course, the last syllable: zhi. The science of phonetics will tell you that zh is a subapical consonant , that is, a consonant made by contact between - and it gets a bit graphic here - the roof of the oral cavity and the underside of the tip of the tongue. But knowing what it is is one thing; getting your nimble tongue around it is quite another. Malayalam too has the zh, but the only other non-Indian language that I know that has a similar sounding consonant is Mandarin Chinese, particularly as spoken in Beijing, where the Erhua is invoked in an exaggerated fashion. But more than any other language, Tamil rejoices in the uniqueness of the zh consonant, and there are countless tongue twisters featuring more zh-s than, say, the number of crores the government lost in the 2G scam . Try this one for size (from wikipedia , where you hear it as well) Ezhai kizhavan vazhaippazath-thol mel saru-sarukki vazhu-vazhukki keezhe vizhunthan. Which means: The poor old man slipped on a banana peel and fell. Now, why do I think that sounds like a political metaphor for DMK patriarch M. Karunanidhi’s current state of being…