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Hi Fred,
Fred, I warn you that I have taken this issue up very seriously and you will have to reckon with my indepth knowledge of konknii and Goa. :-) I am inclined to insist that Calangute should be Kolngutey and not Congutti. The "l" which in Konknii is a pretty deeply pronounced consonant and should be probably written as "ll"...a double l is not pronounced properly by a section of Goans. In fact they leave it out altogether. The same with "deull" or temple. Many Goans (mostly the Christian and also the Hindi speaking people from the rest of India) leave out the deep l and replace it with a light l sound or even a "d" sound. So they say "deudann" instead of "deullann" and so on.
Now the reason for the deep l not being pronounced is due to the Portuguese influence or Hindi influence which does not have this phonetic. That does not mean Konknii does not have it. It does and we should get it right.
As far as the others go, the Konknii pronouciation of what we now write as Mapusa definitely has a more "ha" sound after the M and a nasal "n" sound at the end. So I still vote for Mhapshyanh....although I don't mind changing it to Mhapsheanh.....in fact maybe that is more correct. And although I agree with the general spelling for Margao that you have given I still cannot accept the O in it because the O is pronounced almost silently here and in all probability should be written as Madganv.
And Goyan is better for Goa while Goen could also be considered. The whole problem is some idiot who knew more Portuguese than English wrote out the English spellings to names of places in Goa. That's why they wrote Panjim where they expected the m to be silent. But that's not the way English would pronounce it. And now we are left with a foreign sounding capital name which no real Goan ever uses expect when he/she converses in English.
This is fun. It is also quite hilarious to see the various inputs to this debate.
The problem is that the expat-imagine Goa is quite a different animal from >what is the current ruling ideology in Goa itself.I agree that Goa means different things to different people. And that's okay. But that is also why many people of Goan origin no longer fit in Goa when they return to Goa after being away for long, abroad.
E.g. we have a miniscule portion of the expats on this forum who have hardly even gone to Goa more than a few times in the last twenty years, who happen to think that they know it all. But talking down is a habit many people cultivate when they live a few years abroad and go back east to try to impress on how much they have achieved. Unfortunately, they do let out that they did not achieve even basic courtesy which true Goans have in plenty. Talk to a true native Goan - the gaudo - and see the indepth strength of character and quiet courtesy and respectfulness, not to mention the warmth of heart that they have despite maybe a lack of high education and riches. Somehow, when one goes abroad we mostly see the folks return as brash and loud individuals who think they are God's gift to mankind. The truth is they do not belong anywhere then, neither in the west where they will always be regarded as hailing from India (or Pakistan for that matter) despite the western nation citizenships or green cards which they flaunt, nor in India and Goa where they no longer fit in. That is probably the single most important reason for some expats wanting to free Goa from the so called clutches of India. However, I predict ;-) that ten-fifteen years from now when India will be far richer and far more affluent and far more safer than the west, we will see the reverse exodus of these expats.
Nevertheless it is fun to see these characters in action. I remember the time when this Goan chap who had lived in England for a few years insisted on getting stamps for 20 pence at a local Goan post office. The poor post office clerk didn't know what pence meant and asked whether he meant paisa. Now saying the "paisa" word was beneath this England returned chap's dignity so he stuck to his funny English accent with "pence" and the rest of us in the queue were in splits until someone finally got irritated and just shoeed the England returned chap away.;-)
So let's hope that if we finally get the Goan names right, our expat folks will accept them. But if you think about it, how many of them actually condescend to say Mumbai instead of Bombay ? :-) And saying Kolngutey may really seem so eastern and tacky instead of the fancy Calangute. And Margao is so stylish compared to the real Madganv. ;-)
Have a great 2003.
Sunila
From: Frederick Noronha <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [GOANET] Place names...
Date: Mon, 6 Jan 2003 11:25:11 +0530 (IST)
Correction, Sunila. Not Kolngutey, Mhapshyanh and Madgaon but Congutti,
Mapshea and Modganv... and surely people like Jorge Abreu Noronha could
give us more phonetically-correct spellings. My own education was mostly >in the phonetically-far-from-accurate English language. (That too, in Goa, >which makes it phonetically even more inaccurate!)
Devangari to Roman/Latin script renderings tend to be prone to error, specially if done without the symbols (these are not practical perhaps to implement) of the good old colonial times or the International Phonetic Alphabet and Daniel Jones' Pronouncing Dictionary.The other way round, from Roman/Latin to Devanagiri is less prone to error, since the latter script is more precise as to the exact sound each alphabet signifies. Of course, an agrument could be made that Devanagari too could do with a handful of extra characters to represent the peculiar sounds of Konkani (or Konknni, if you prefer) speech.
To everyone taking part in this debate: Are we willing to take into account that Goa means different things to different people? Maybe there are five or six or eight different Goas out there, created according to the image and likeness of what we have in our imagination. These could be defined by geography, gender, caste, religion, and our own experiences with emigration and colonialism. The problem is that the expat-imagine Goa is quite a different animal from what is the current ruling ideology in Goa itself. Likewise, writers (all of us) are guilty of creating our own realities... These are complexities which perhaps need to be acknowledged before plunging into the debate.FN
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