Dear friends, Seems that Floriano is raising a ruckus about as silly a matter as the spelling of the title of a movie. I fail to understand his sudden concern for the spelling of Konkani words. In the last few years we have seen in Herald scores of Tiatr advertisements wherein the titles literally murder Konkani. And the tiatrists claim to be writers of Konkani in Roman script, something that Shetgaonkar has never claimed? But has Floriano reprimanded the tiatrists even once, let alone call for a boycott of their shows? So why take on poor Shetgaonkar? Is there more than meets the eye here?
Let us look at the issue dispassionately. Unlike Devanagari and other Indic scripts, a majority of the characters of the Roman alphabet do not possess their own unique sound; this varies not only from language to language but also within one and the same language, even within a single word. These sounds have evolved separately and independently over several centuries in each of the various European languages for which the Roman script is native; it has been there right from the birth of each of them. Take, for instance, the letter 'a' in English words like bake, bald, bat, barley etc. Looks illogical, but not to the English reader; he reads the entire word, not the individual characters. When the Roman alphabet is ADOPTED for a non-native language like Konkani, specific sounds need to be specified for individual characters, clusters of characters and diacritics. The XVI-XVII century missionaries had done this. But the system got lost in the hiatus of a couple of centuries when Konkani was banned from even from being spoken. During this period, all the books produced by the missionaries were also lost. So, when the language began to be written again in this script by semiliterates during the nineteenth century, each one wrote according to his lights. Although attempts were later made to develop a system, in the absence of an enforcing authority, an universally accepted method has eluded us to date. Hence orthographic differences still persist. Floriano insists that the word should be written as 'poltodcho'. Now, the letter D has at least two distinct sounds in Konkani: the soft Portuguese one denoted by a single 'd' and the hard English one denoted generally by 'dd'. Since Floriano uses a single 'd' for a hard sound, it is obvious that he prefers English phonetics. Consider the English word 'paltry'. Doesn't the soumd of the first syllable closely resemble that of 'pal' in 'paltadacho'? And isn't the sound of the second 'a' the same as that of the first? Moreover, the missionaries also used an italicised 'a' for this sound. For instance, today we write 'Pormesporacho' but in Thomas Stephens' Doutrina Crista the same word appears as "PArAmespAracho" (the capital A's stand for italicised 'a's). Thus it appears that Shetgaonkar has not committed a great sacrilege after all. On another site, Floriano wrote: <<There has been other names for Konkani movies especially the 'Buimearantlo Munis' [ a man from the cave] which name the Goan people have related very much to the movie on hand.>> I do not think anyone will read the first word in "Buimearantlo Munis" the way it is spoken in normal parlance; it is more likely to be read as 'bui-mearantlo', since, before a vowel, M takes a consonantal sound, not nasal. If we were intent on getting the correct sound, it could be written as 'bhuim-erantlo' or, better still, as 'bhum-yerantlo'. Please also note that the B is aspirated. Mog asum. Sebastian Borges ----- Original Message ----- Date: Tue, 25 May 2010 12:20:58 +0530 From: "floriano" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Subject: [Goanet] Fw: ' Paldadacho Munis' - Review by Derek Almeida - GT- May 25 Pg12. Message-ID: <48290e29cacf4d7591c80dd2fa84e...@home> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" ----- Original Message ----- From: floriano To: Devika Sequeira Sent: Tuesday, May 25, 2010 12:18 PM Subject: Re: ' Paldadacho Munis' - Review by Derek Almeida - GT- May 25 Pg12. Devika, My dear, You don't know what you are talking about. I am protesting the word 'Paltadacho' because as according to me, in Konkanni context, it tries to sell me 'poltodcho' . If you don't know your konkanni, don't blame me. The title must be as good as the movie. I can accept 'P o l t o d c h o' but not 'paltadacho', because the Konkanni I grew with, has no word like paltadacho meaning poltodcho. If such a word does exist, then it is a bastardized version and anything bastardized will not work, at least with Konkanni. I have not said anything about not accepting the movie, only that true Goans should boycot it until the name is sensibly changed or corrected. However, I shall want you to know that I have not yet seen the movie and shall eagerly see it as amd when to the name is announced as ' POLTODCHO MUNIS' btw KONKANNI IS DOWNSTREAM TODAY BECAUSE OF PSEUDO-GOANS and PSEUDO KONKANNIs. And I am calling you 'one' because you have the cheek to open up your gob on this. B/rgds floriano goasuraj 9890470896 ----- Original Message ----- From: Devika Sequeira To: floriano Sent: Tuesday, May 25, 2010 11:19 AM Subject: Re: ' Paldadacho Munis' - Review by Derek Almeida - GT- May 25 Pg12. This is nothing short of absurd. Have you seen the film? For once we have a Goan filmmaker who has defied all odds to make a really professional, sensitive film, shorn of all the filmi melodrama one sees even in 'parallel' Indian cinema, and you believe you have the right to challenge him on such a petty count? Please keep your low-level provincial politics out of art and literature. Devika Sequeira On 25 May 2010 10:40, floriano <[email protected]> wrote: As we are writing this, WE ARE FURIOUS' Why? >
