A Konkani transliteration using English script
Konkani does not have a script of its own. In times past and right up to the present, would-be Konkani writers have had to adopt the script of the region in which they live. The script used is usually Kannada in the south of India and Devanagari in areas further to the north. Up to this point, there has been no definitive usage of English (also called Latin or Roman) script to convey content in Konkani.
These scripts are by no means ideal as a vehicle for written Konkani. Kannada script is not widely used in places such as Maharashtra (and specifically Mumbai) which harbour a sizeable Bhanap community. Devanagari is very widely used (for a multitude of languages), but it does not capture all of the vowel and consonant sounds used in the Bhanap variant of Konkani, which we call aamcigalAnh (aamci for short).
More importantly, neither Kannada nor Devanagari are in general readable by the younger generations of the Bhanap diaspora outside India. However, almost all members of the Bhanap community, wherever located, have no trouble reading the Latin script used for English.
If knowledge and appreciation of aamci is not to be lost to future generations of Bhanaps, they need to have at least a working knowledge of the language. In order to teach it to them, oral-only systems are insufficient, though they are of course used to teach the language to babies and growing children.
It follows that in order to teach aamci to members of the diaspora who have been born and brought up outside India, serious consideration needs to be given to developing a transliteration of Konkani which uses English script. Given that teachers will be non-professional volunteers (a mixture of parents, community elders and interested young adults), the chosen system should make it as easy as possible to generate content which is used for learning and teaching. To this end, diacritic marks should be avoided because they require special keyboards or software tools which potentially hinder the productivity of those tasked with creating teaching materials. It's expected that teaching materials will consist of audio, video and text-based tools that use the chosen transliteration scheme.
What's been tried already?
The largest Konkani community in India is the Goan Konkani-speaking community. Some of its academics came up with a website called Konkanverter which was announced in 2012 and is still under development. They propose a set of transliteration schemes including one for English script, but it has some drawbacks when considering its use with aamci:
aamci, in common with all mainstream Indian languages, draws a distinction between short and long vowel sounds, such as the vowel sounds in bin and been, but Konkanverter's scheme for English script doesn't appear to distinguish between them. Similarly, it seems to lump together the vowel sounds in pull and pool, and the vowel sounds in foal and fall. In aamci, we want to keep these distinct.
Konkanverter's scheme uses o to transliterate the vowel sound in her, which is counter-intuitive and likely to be hard for people to adjust to.
Certain consonant sounds are transliterated by doubling up characters. This doesn't work well in aamci, in which those sounds are common, because the sounds are sometimes extended in length of vocalisation, and that is very unwieldy to express in Konkanverter's scheme.
For these reasons and others, we have chosen not to use Konkanverter's scheme. In the succeeding paragraphs, we present a transliteration that uses only ordinary English characters and no diacritics.
Our proposed scheme
We propose a scheme based on the following ideas:
The scheme is case-sensitive. Indian scripts don't use capital letters, and so we don't use capitals for punctuation either, but we do choose to use them as distinct letters intended to convey particular sounds. For example, in our scheme A, D, L, N, S and T are distinct from a, d, l, n, s and t.
Many aamci words use extended consonant sounds. These are conveyed by doubling up the consonant sequences used.
Hyphens are used for disambiguation. For example, the question (meaning "where?") is transliterated as kha-yeenh? as opposed to khayeenh?, because the ay, if not broken up with a hyphen, would indicate a different vowel sound to what's intended. (Note: hyphens can also be used in teaching materials to e.g. indicate verb ending rules. The interpretation of hyphens should be clear from the context.)
There are rare situations where vowel sounds are extended more than is usual. For example, in the sound va-atsa (the imperative go), the first vowel is longer than the second, and this is transliterated using a-a to indicate an extended a sound. You can't of course double up the vowel (as is done for extended consonant sounds) and use aa for this uncommon case, as that is used for .
Vowels
We've identified fourteen distinct vowel sounds used in aamci. The table below shows for each vowel the transliteration used and the sound it makes (click on the speaker icon to hear the corresponding sound).
| a | aa | ||
| i | ee | ||
| u | oo | ||
| ay | ai | ||
| o | ou | ||
| A | aw | ||
| e | nh |
Consonants
We've identified forty-four distinct consonant sounds used in aamci. The table below shows for each vowel the transliteration used and the sound it makes (click on the speaker icon to hear the corresponding sound).
| k | kh | g | gh | ngn | |||||
| c | ch | j | jh | ny | |||||
| T | Th | D | Dh | N | |||||
| t | th | d | dh | n | |||||
| p | ph | b | bh | m | |||||
| y | r | l | v 1 | ||||||
| sh | S | s | h | Zh | |||||
| L | f | z | zh | ts | |||||
| ksh | tr | dny | shr | dz |
Dealing with elision
Elision is a common feature in spoken aamci – it's very common to drop vowel sounds (and sometimes, consonants as well) at the ends of words that are in the middle of sentences. For example, in the phrase (meaning I want water), the transliteration would be maakk'aa uddaak'a zaayi, although the component words are maakkaa (to me), uddaaka (water) and zaayi (want). When the whole sentence is spoken, the aa at the end of maakkaa and the a and the end of uddaaka are lost, and this is indicated using apostrophes. In contexts where text styling is possible, it might be possible to indicate elision using a scheme such as maakkaa uddaaka zaayi. However, the apostrophe-based approach is the most widely applicable.
Some examples
Here are some example sounds with their transliterations using the scheme described in the preceding sections.
(meaning I) – haanhvanh.
(meaning stick) – kaaDDi. Note the use of a double-consonant to extend the D sound. The single consonant version, kaaDi, would sound like (meaning remove as an imperative).
(meaning a sweet mango is sour when it's expensive) – goD'u aambaw mhaarag'a aaslAr'i aams'aw zaattaa. Or, to show the elided vowels another way: goDu aambaw mhaaraga aaslAri aamsaw zaattaa.
(meaning this broke apart on that) – hAnh taajjayr'i bhetlenh. This shows distinct vowel sounds (shown underlined) which are often wrongly transliterated using e (in our scheme, only the last two would be).
Unhelpful transliterations
Some experienced aamci speakers (including us, before we started looking into this
) have in the past used informal, imprecise transliterations which are
unhelpful – they confuse newcomers to the language. Here are some things to avoid:
Using ch to transliterate both the last consonant in (meaning chair) and the first consonant in (meaning boy). As you can hear from the corresponding sound clips, these are in fact distinct sounds and should be transliterated differently.
Using e to transliterate any sound that approximates to a short e sound in English. In aamci there are three distinct vowels: (should be transliterated as ay – it's the vowel sound in English pay), (should be transliterated as A – it's the vowel sound in English pair) and (should be transliterated as e – it's the vowel sound in English pen).
Using o loosely to transliterate any sound that is similar to o in English. In aamci there are two distinct sounds: (should be transliterated as o) and (should be transliterated as aw). The vowel at the end of is not the same as the one at the end of English hello.
Using n to transliterate both a fully vocalised n sound as well as the partially vocalised , which should be transliterated as nh.
Design choices
A transliteration is just a scheme for converting sounds into character sequences and back. As long as it is consistent and works for all possible sounds in the language being transliterated, it could be argued that any specific choices of particular character sequences to particular sounds is arbitrary. Nevertheless, the choices should fit with what typical users of the transliteration might expect. It's probably worth outlining some of the reasoning behind the specific choices made in the scheme described here:
Character sequences should be as short as possible, to minimise the effort required to both write and read transliterations.
The use of c to indicate the in chair is because of the preceding point. Other languages use it too (Italian ciao comes to mind). The sound is very common in aamci, so using one character instead of two is considered worthwhile. The ch transliteration is used for .
nh is included with the vowels since it always modifies a vowel sound – if it appears other than following a vowel sound, it would be treated as an aspirated n (for example, in nhaaNi , meaning bathroom, or at the beginning of nhaauncAnh , meaning the act of bathing). By aspirated, we mean vocalised together with a breath expelled with some force.
The transliteration for aspirated consonants is obtained by appending h to the transliteration for the corresponding unaspirated consonants.
The limits of transliteration
There are some limits to what any transliteration scheme can convey. Here are some reasons:
The lengths of short and long vowels are relative, not absolute. In a given spoken sentence, therefore, what is nominally a short vowel in an emphasized syllable might be held for as long as (or longer than) an instance of the corresponding long vowel in the same sentence.
A particular consonant in a given word might be extended in certain situations but not in others.
When spoken at normal speed, a vowel might sound as if it's between two "pure" vowel sounds (for example, between o and aw).
Comments