Wouldn’t you know it? I go to the protest safely, get back to Darjeeling City, have lunch, and get food poisoning. Just like Ghising, blind to where the true danger lies…
Also, I should never have made fun of India’s effete strike culture. Now Kolkata is on strike in earnest, and I’m stuck here for the next forty-eight hours. And I mean stuck here. At my hotel and its immediate environs. No vehicles today.
By the way, I have figured out why the change from Calcutta to Kolkata bothers me so much more than Benares nee Varanasi or Mumbai nee Bombay. It’s because English words just don’t begin with “ko.” I think koala and kohlrabi are the only two words in common circulation that start with “ko.” And those are hardly your good ol’ Aryan or Romance language nouns.
And no common English word begins with “kol.” I don’t have any idea how to tackle pronouncing that. I realize the intent is to revive indigenous traditions, but the whole point of a transliteration is to communicate how to say a word to people who don’t read your alphabet. And those people, even the kohlrabi and koala lovers among them, don’t know how to pronounce “kol.”
It doesn’t help that everyone says “Cal-cut-ahh.” I don’t know if that is because “Kolkata” is pronounced “Cal-cut-ahh” or because the name change hasn’t really caught on. I need some of those little cartoon speech bubbles.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Long time reader, first-time poster here -- I hope that you are feeling better! So I've spent my morning wracking my brain trying to think of a single English word starting with "kol," but I failed miserably. Turning then to Apple's dictionary, I found some borrowed words (kola, kolo, kolinsky), but, as you noted with the "ko" words, none are particularly Anglo or even European in their origin. By the way, a kolo is a Slavic dance done in a cirlce, and a kolinsky is some sort of Asian weasel. They also list kolkhoz, which is apparently the Russian word for their lovely Soviet collective farms, but I figured that one is just too much of a stretch.
In any case, I hope that the strike has lifted and that the food poisoning has abated and that you are back on the trail of the groundbreaking Indian Idol theory of politics :-)
I think "kolinsky" has potential -- the sort of thing that can be worked into cocktail parties or comparative seminars in order to subtly belittle others.
Back channel queries reveal some unfamiliarity with kohlrabi, which is a kind of cabbage. Also, checking Wikipedia, I found it has a connection to my Michigan roots:
"Hamburg Township, Michigan, USA, has titled itself the 'Kohlrabi Capital of the World' and at one time had a kohlrabi festival which drew 600 people at its peak in 1985."
So, you have now joined an elite group of people, perhaps no more than 6 or 7 hundred worldwide, who have ever even heard of kohlrabi.
You're welcome.
Post a Comment