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Articles: My Thoughts | Telugu in English script
- Prof. Narasimham Brahmandam
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I am a retired professor in horticulture from the AP Agrl.University, a Ph.D from the I.A.R.I. New Delhi way back in 1967 when I was 47 years old. I am 83 years old now.
One of the things I have been advocating is the use of the letters of the English alphabet , with a simple modification, for all Indian languages. I also prepared a self-instructor for Telugu “ Vidya Book one”. I requested Telugu weeklies to keep one page in each issue to print a Telugu feature in Roman script so people will get accustomed to read Telugu in the English lipi. No one obliged. The next generation of Telugus in the US will be totally cut off from Telugu literature, (and consequently from telugu culture), because they can’t read it. They do not have the time or patience nor the necessity to learn the 52 letters of the Telugu alphabet and their various combinations adding up to about 150 characters. And unless they get familiar enough to read fluently they will not have the interest to read Telugu literature. I request the Telugu people in the US to take up the job of issuing a monthly bulletin in the English alphabet and send a copy of it to Telugu magazines in India urging them to do the same.
Even in India, Telugus in other states face the same difficulty. Even in AP, a child is required to learn three scripts, Telugu, Devanagari and English which is a great burden on them. Many children are opting to German or French to avoid Telugu. If all the three languages could be written in the same script, they can save a lot of time to learn other things. Besides, it will promote national integration.
Modifications to the English script to suit our phonetic system.
Let us first assure ourselves that script is only a symbol system to write down the sounds we pronounce as words. There needs to be no sentiments about a script. The present Telugu script is also the brahmi script adopted by all Indian languages. By usage, it has modified itself regionally into various scripts. We are already used to transliterate languages in other scripts. Most religious books in Samsrit are transliterated into Telugu script for the convenience of those who do not know the Devanagari script. We write our names in the English script. There is hardly any name board in a Telugu bazaar which does not write Telugu words in English script. North eastern languages that do not possess a script have adopted the English alphabet for their languages. There is, therefore nothing new in using English script for Indian languages.
However, the English script has to be adapted for our use. Practically all European languages use the same letters. But their spelling systems are different. It is necessary to bear in mind that we are going to use the letters of the English script but not its spelling system. For us, a letter represents the same sound always, and a sound is always represented by the same letter.
Several methods of modifications have been suggested for this purpose. In one system, vowels in lower case represent the short sound and in capitals represent the long sounds. The only difficulty about this system is, that in All-Capital captions or boards the difference vanishes. Also it looks odd. There is what is called the Roman script which is used to transliterate Snaskrit words in English. This has been approved by international convention. The difficulty with this system is, that it needs special fonts with sub or super markings which are not available on most key boards. Therefore, I suggest that a convention can be adapted with this change that a mark is added to the letter instead of a sub or super marking. The symbols available on key boards generally are ^ * | ’ < >. Of these, I have preferred the ’ mark for the reason that we need no apostrophe in our languages. The following is he scheme:
a , aa.i, ii, u, uu, ri, rii, e, ee, o, oo, ai, au, am ah.
Of these ee needs some explanation. North Indian languages including Sanskrit have only the long e sound and so they use only the single e for this purpose. But in Southern languages including Telugu, both the short and long forms are needed. We are familiar with the use of ee for long sound as in ‘sleep’ etc. if e is short e as in ‘men’, ‘pen’. etc. it is but reasonable that ee represents the long sounf as in ‘gate.plate etc. If we remember we are not following the English spelling scheme, it is not difficult to get familiar with this.
Similarly, oo represents the long sound as in ‘door’ or ‘floor; and not the uu sound as in ‘boot’ or short u sound as in ‘book.’
Coming to the consonants,
k, kh,g,gh, ng
c, ch, j, jh, nj
t’ th’ d’, dh’ n’ (in the roman script, it is this hard sound that is marked)
t, th, d, dh, n
p, ph, b, bh, m
y, r, l v, s’, sh, s, h , l’ In the Roman script s’ is represented by s׳ and sh by s with a dot under the letter.
In spoken Telugu another sound like a in man is needed in words like “ceppaadu” “vel’l’aadu” which can be indicated by ’ after the aa. If you can have a short cut for the symbol ׳ this is better. (In e-mail some times this symbol is not recognized)
ii paddhati miiku naccitee, diinini vaad׳ukalooki teevaccu. diini miida vimars׳lu gaani, maarpulu gaani suucistee santoshistaanu.
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