[Buddha-l] the true authority on meanings

[Richard Hayes]

On Monday 22 October 2007 15:28, jkirk wrote:

> Here's a good example of how 'a's get done in Bangla pronunciation: take
> the name of a famous Bengali art historian, Pratapraditya Pal. In Bangla it
> would be: Protoprodito Paal. 

Linguistically anal-retentive fellow that I am, it annoys me to distraction 
that Aravinda becomes Arvind in Hindi and Aurobindo in Bengal and that Vimala 
becomes Bimal in Bengali. 

This is one area where my penchant for completely irrational prejudices 
manifests itself in its most humiliating glory. I suspect all this antipathy 
toward Hindi and Bengali stems from my life-long seething outrage at American 
English as a graveyard of the mangled corpses of so many once-beautiful 
words, kidnapped from other languages and then mutilated beyond recognition 
by the inflexible American tongue, driven by the even less pliable American 
mind. 

-- 
Richard