Baba Alfred you are dead on. A gem! Mother will be hapy to hear this. Going by Kokani phonetics it would be Deu, although one leans towards Deo in spelling it, and so is Deunchar (or deunsar with the s as ch). In classic (as in a measure of precision) terms it would be Deu, but we will be confusing the rest of India. I say this in jest. The lexicographers and philologists should weigh in though.
Dev is very rare even among Goan Hindus although it seems to sound as such, But people do not all hear the same and besides the tendency in trasliterating is to lean (practically trip) towards English phonetics. It is fascinating how various languages use the Roman alphabet with additions or subtractions to convey unique sounds. If I am not mistaken among languages regularly wriiten in Roman (Romi) script, Konkani contains some of the richest and fascinating sounds, and moreso without a resonabl thorough imbibed sensibiliy of the language, it particularly hard to pronounce since we do not use diacritics. So, words like leitao, rong (color), saimbachi vidhya (physics), dhanvten borop (cursive writing), angostranm (angostran ghalun novim devachea/de.uachea jhevonak soglim) or arthavinayas (semantics) appear and sound differently if one does not relate to Konakani phonteics via Romi. The last word is interesting in that although it should be prounounced as orth (or arth, written with a half moon over the a, to phoneticize as or, as in the English for) it will be prounced as in the Hindi or Marathi arth which I believe should not be the case. I have felt that the scholars went towards excessive Sanskrtization of Konakani sounds. I wish I had know about these areas of study in my wacky youth in Mumbai. : ) If writing in Romi, Konkani is also harder to write and pronounce if one has not heard correctly and applied to memory the sounds as conveyed though the Romi in ones head. Btw, way, I could very much be wrong in my spellings above. venantius > Message: 8 > Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2007 14:13:47 +0200 > From: "Alfred de Tavares" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: Re: [Goanet] DEO vo DEV? (Gabe Menezes)Re: Vol 2, Issue 632 > To: goanet@lists.goanet.org > Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed > > I think the sad lot of you, whichever kashti you phoneticate by, have > missed: > DEU, resorted to by cathecism books I had to do with as a brat. > Alfred -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet-goanet.org/attachments/20070729/8b79163b/attachment.htm