---------------------------------------------------------- Archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/goa-net/ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Goanet2003/ ----------------------------------------------------------
> From: "Sunila Muzawar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > pronounced name for our beautiful capital. And while we are at it, we could > also alter the horribly English sounding names given to all other Goan > places. E.g. Calangute should be Kolngutey and Mapusa should be Mhapshyanh > and Margao should be Madgaon, etc. What a relief that would be to finally > get rid of the pseudo westernisation of Goan names. While we are at it, > maybe we could change the spelling of our language name from Konkani to > Konknii. ;-) 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. Incidentally, my earlier suggestion was kind of tongue-in-cheek (going into the future via the past, etc). But Ivor and others have given it the seriousness it did not perhaps deserves. All that one was saying was that different linguistic speakers use their own names for the place. Probably some are more way-off the mark than others going by what is one the mouth of the average speaker (for example, both Panaji *and* the Portuguese Pangim, both very similar... and of course, the English-influenced Panjim). 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
