Changing pronounciation of Indic languages

English has had a major impact on all Indic languages since the times of the Raj. It is quite evident to knowers of Indic languages that roman script is no match to the richness of Indic languages. To overcome this limitation, transliteration schemes have been proposed. Of various schemes, National Library at Calcutta romanization transliteration scheme is the most popular for Indic languages.

This scheme is good if it is known to everybody. But over the years, all the modifiers to basic roman scripts like ā, ṭa etc have disappeared from transliterated words leading to corrupted pronounciation by not only someone who is not a native speaker of an Indic language but also by native speakers. For example, in Hindi, it is `Ram' but it is mostly written as `Rama' due to the transliteration scheme. Any casual speaker would incorrectly pronounce the word.

On the other hand, this has lead to a pronounciation that is somewhere between original Sanskrit (which had an inherent visarga, अः, at the end of words).

As I mentioned in one of my previous blogs, it's amazing how languages grow!!