> When he returned to India from the Silicon Valley in 2019, he didn’t settle down in Chennai, the headquarters of Zoho, but in a village called Mathalamparai, 650 kilometres away in Tenkasi district in Tamil Nadu.
>The very idea of a billionaire moving to a village that's hardly known and hard to pronounce, and images of him pedalling a bicycle around paddy fields, driving an electric auto, or relaxing in a thinnai (shaded verandah) wearing a half-sleeved shirt and a white dhoti evoked curiosity.
Must been written by American, as European I find the village name very easy to pronounce. Same with finding exotic riding a bicycle.
>> "Must been written by American, as European I find the village name very easy to pronounce. Same with finding exotic riding a bicycle."
I'm going to go out on a limb and say a guy named N S Ramnath who lives in Bangalore (Twitter bio) is probably not American.
edit to add: As a European, you might be making faulty assumptions about the pronunciation, while he's aware of numerous pitfalls that vex people who don't know the language. As an American, I see this a lot from Europeans who try to pronounce place names from indigenous languages that we take for granted. I've heard some hilarious verbal renderings of Okefenokee, for example.
Non-English native European here - now I'm curious, what's the correct pronunciation of Okefenokee? I found a video [1] which pretty much matches how I'd expect it to be pronounced
Haven’t watched the video but i live near that swamp and we call it “OH-key-fen-OH-key”
Not sure how the native way to say it was, but a lot of natural features in South Georgia were taken, nominatively & literally, from the Muskogee people (“Creek Indians”)
then he is making as false assumptions as me, because at least by Latin transcription Matha-lampa-rai is nothing hard to pronounce (I would assume H is silent and everything else read phonetically, all As as A in Alphabet, with last I read as Y in Yes), someone please prove me wrong about this pronunciation, I don't care about nuances in local Indian languages but by transcription I would assume this pronunciation and if it's not correct then it's issue with transcription and not me
the ones usually messing pronunciation of foreign names are native English speakers who are not using phonetical languages, as European speaking phonetic language I've had never problem to read correctly names of Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Malaysian or Thai cities as intended since we don't give special pronunciation to each letter as illogical English language
as for Okefenokee I don't really care about transcriptions made by native English speakers which are usually hilariously bad
that doesn't really make any sense (friend's proununciation, yours/mine is the logical one), which OTOH is not surprising at all with how "logical" is English language, but I have higher expectations from non-native English speaking nations transcriptions, where I expect better accuracy than from English speaker's nonsense
I'm Indian, though not a Tamil-speaker, and I couldn't tell you with 100% certainty the correct pronunciation of that village name. At least not when written in the English/Latin alphabet. I can think of 2 different pronunciations for at least 4 of the syllables in it.
I'm a Tamil speaker (but raised in Canada so, not as fluent as a native speaker), and agree, there's a lot of information loss when going from Tamil to English simply because there's multiple letters that either have no English equivalent, or are aren't distinguished in English.
I would translate மத்தளம்பாறை as MaththalampaaRai, rather than Mathalamparai. The a's have different lengths, so single a's are short (as in "ma"), and double a's are long. Double consonants like "த்த" are pronounced separately, so "Matha-" should be "Maththa". And finally, the "R" at the end is a rolling r, distinguished from the regular r "ர" - a good example of a Tamil letter with no equivalent letter in English!
And, I know this is unrelated, but in terms of syntax, I find Tamil to English translation really suffers from the way Tamil reverse subject object verb order (Tamil is to Reverse Polish Notation (RPA) as English is to regular, clunky, bracket notation), and the option multiple words into a single verb with recursively adding suffixes. Tamil basically offers a lot more degrees of freedom then English, which makes it far more expressive, but also adds a lot of cost to mastering correct grammar. The majority of 1st generation Tamils can only speak a simpler subset of the language. Personally, I find Tamil tends to be less clunky, and have quicker, more pleasing rhythm, then any English equivalent.
>The very idea of a billionaire moving to a village that's hardly known and hard to pronounce, and images of him pedalling a bicycle around paddy fields, driving an electric auto, or relaxing in a thinnai (shaded verandah) wearing a half-sleeved shirt and a white dhoti evoked curiosity.
Must been written by American, as European I find the village name very easy to pronounce. Same with finding exotic riding a bicycle.