Standardising the spellings of Jain words in English

[Guest guest]

05/03/2002

Dear Friends,

Jai Jinendra

 

I have noticed great disparity in the way we spell Jain words in English.

Some of us add extra vowels for emphasis, others use diacritical marks. The

problem is that our Indian langauages are phonetic. And English is not. That

is why each letter of the Devangari or any other script manages ot convey

much more than the letters of the English alphabet. For instance, the letter

"n."

 

In English the letter "n" is read as "n", pronounced as "en". It conveys no

meaning by itself. In Hindi, the letter "n" is read as "Na", pronounced as

"Na" and means no. It is a complete word by itself. In Hindi and in other

Indian languages, the letters are complete by themselves. But in English, the

letters are incomplete, and cannot be pronounced without the presence of

vowels. There are notable exceptions like the word "rhythm". But by and

large, in the English language, the consonants are incomplete without the

vowels because no all words are pronounced as they are spelt. Whereas in

Hindi, each word is pronounced exactly the way it is read.

 

They idea is to standardise the spellings of Jain words in English. So that

all of us spell standard Jain words like "Ahinsa, "Tirthankar", "Mahavir" in

the same way.

 

Please consider doing away with diacritical marks. These are useful only to

scholars. They only serve to confuse the layman. And then we see comon people

AHINSA as AhiMsa. They do not realise that the diacritical mark (a dot on the

letter "m") is used to indicate that it should be pronounced as the letter

"n." Insteas, lots of Jains hapily go about mispronouncing the word Ahinsa as

AhiMsa! What is worse, I have the word Ahinsa misspelled even in print, where

it is spelt as AHIMSA, without any diacritical mark to indicate that the "m"

in "Ahimsa" should bre pronounced as "N" and not "m".

 

So let us set up a consistent spell code and circulate it. If all of us use

it, it automatically becomes standardised. The key should be simplicity. And

brevity. We don't need to spell Mahavir as MAHAAVEER. Nor do we need to use

diacritical marks like the bar over the letters "a" and "i".

 

If we know someone by the name of Anitaben, do we spell it as Aneetaaben?

Or do we spell it with a bar over the letters "i" and "a" and an acent over

the "e"? We spell it simply as Anitaben. Let us keep our Jain spellings just

as simple!

 

If you are looking for scholarly precedents, look at how the great nineteenth

century Sanskrit scholar Monier-Williams spells the word Sanskrit. He spells

it as SANSKRIT. He could have spelt it diacritically as S A M S K R T, with

diacritical mark (a dot) on top of the letter "m", and a dot beneathe the

letter "r" to indicate the i sound of Sanskrit. But Monier-Williams chose to

spell Sanskrit as Sanskrit. In his Preface, to the dictionary, he explains

that he has anglicised the spelling of the word Sanskrit, as it is so

commonly used. We can use the same reason to spell our typical Jain words in

the simplest and shortest way possible.

 

We can spell ADINATH as ADINATH. No need for Aadeenaath, or putting a bar

over both "a"s in the name. Same way, MAHAVIR. Similarly, TIRTHANKAR.

 

Simplicity and brevity are the key to good communication.

So here is where I sign off.

 

Yours in Ahinsa,

 

Manish Modi

 

HINDI GRANTH KARYALAY

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