The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : From English to Kannada

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Aug 14, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

From English to Kannada

Bageshree S.

— PHOTO: BHAGYA PRAKASH K.

Confusion: Some of the signboards that have been translated from English to Kannada.

Bangalore: Letters of the Kannada alphabet are feeling very stretched these days. Literally so, because they are trying desperately to fit themselves into the “global village” culture of namma Bengaluru.

This is best illustrated by the boards of shops and establishments in the city. With people increasingly opting for anglicised names on the one hand and Kannada organisations insisting that boards be displayed in Kannada on the other, you have a rather difficult situation at hand.

Consider the word ‘pizza’, for instance, the Italian food that is fast becoming the staple of the upper crust Bangalorean. It took us true blue Kannadigas a while to twist our tongues to say the hint of ‘t’ in the word. The poor old Kannada alphabet is finding it even harder. Two major international pizza chains write the word in two different ways; one chooses to write it as ‘peeja’ and other as ‘peedja’.

English can get away with any kind of ambiguity, considering that you never say anything as you write it. But Kannada, with a phonetic script, has a tough call every time it has to accommodate something ‘foreign’. With English becoming more and more pervasive in our boards (as in our lives), you sometimes have a somewhat bizarre situation. For instance, a specialised beauty clinic in a big mall in Bangalore goes by the name Nail Bar. The Kannada board reads ‘Nela Bar’. Nail sure is not easy to write, but you can surely arrive at something more approximate than ‘nela’, which means ground in Kannada. With using a bit of French and Spanish becoming fashionable, this gets even more complicated. Consider, for instance, Fiorano Restoranté or Evoluzione.

While Kannada letters have a hard enough time stretching and pulling themselves to spell out these ‘outlandish’ words and ideas, there is a tendency to replace even the existing Kannada words with English ones. When was the last time, for example, you saw the word ‘angadi’ on any board in Bangalore? Almost all of them have been replaced by the English word ‘shop’, ‘store’, ‘novelties’ and so on. If you want to see the height of this tendency, head for the BDA shopping complex in Banashankari 2nd Stage. The board outside displays the shops that the complex houses, every single one of them being English words transcribed in Kannada, ranging from ‘bookshop’, to ‘vegetable shop’ and ‘fruit shop’.

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