Is it “Camel-uh” or “Cam-ahl-uh”?

    • magnetosphere@fedia.io
      29·
      1 month ago

      Thank you for this. I’ve heard her name mispronounced so often that I genuinely thought kah-MALL-uh was correct. Whoops! Comma-la it is!

        • Annoyed_🦀 🏅@monyet.cc
          1·
          1 month ago

          🤷I’ve been pronouncing it as Ko-Ma-La without the emphasise of ow. I appreciate this post though, i’ve seen so many asian name being butchered by english speaking country it become annoying.

          • otp@sh.itjust.works
            2·
            1 month ago

            Ko-Ma-La without the emphasise of ow.

            I’m not sure I follow. Coma would probably be “ko-ma”, like I’d suggested, whereas comma is something like “cah-ma”…but I’m not sure where the “ow” comes in

    • MHLoppy@fedia.io
      16·
      1 month ago

      “Comma-la” unfortunately doesn’t help much for people without US accents lol (though of course people in the US are who the question and answer are most relevant to). On first reading – without the accent or something close to it – it implies “kom-uh-luh”, whereas with the accent it implies something more like “kah-muh-luh”, just based on how people pronounce “comma” differently.

    • Miaou@jlai.lu
      1·
      1 month ago

      It’s funny because the way you spelt it sounds like the first “don’t” of the video you linked. Americans in general seem to make a point of pronouncing things their way rather than how they should be. I don’t think it’s racism as much as it is laziness.

      • memfree@lemmy.ml
        2·
        1 month ago

        their way rather than how they should be.

        Every language has different sounds. It has long been understood that languages will translate words/names into versions they can actually hear and pronounce. Sadly, some people mock or demean people who try to speak a non-native language and make errors in it. In the U.S. it used to be fairly common to mock Asians coming from a language with only one liquid consonant sound for their inability to differentiate between ‘r’ and ‘l’ sounds.

        I know I can’t hear the difference in various Russian language vowels and while I can hear tones, I don’t know how I’d explain their pronunciation in an Anglicized name – or if it would be relevant.

        While I appreciate that regional accents mean that non-U.S. citizens might not say “comma” the way it is heard in the U.S., I do expect that if a U.S. citizen tells me to pronounce their own name in a U.S. manner, then that is how it “should be” pronounced.

      • Umbrias@beehaw.org
        1·
        1 month ago

        sorry are you saying people should pronounce their own names in ways they don’t prefer to be “correct”? Also etc etc language guides are descriptive not prescriptive.

        • Isoprenoid@programming.devEnglish
          5·
          1 month ago

          Did you read the rest of my post? You can’t say “correctly pronounce it”, and then not give instruction. That doesn’t help anyone.

          • PapaStevesy@lemmy.world
            1·
            1 month ago

            If the video specifically made to teach you how to pronounce her name didn’t help, what makes you think I can?

            • Isoprenoid@programming.devEnglish
              3·
              1 month ago

              Your original post tells us to pronounce it the way she says it, but doesn’t actually show us how she says it.

              How did you expect us to pronounce it correctly if we haven’t heard her say it?

              • PapaStevesy@lemmy.world
                1·
                1 month ago

                Your original post tells us to pronounce it the way she says it, but doesn’t actually show us how she says it.

                Because I’m not her. You figured it out and found a video on your own, you clearly didn’t need me. Why would I know better than her how to pronounce it?

                How did you expect us to pronounce it correctly if we haven’t heard her say it?

                I didn’t. I presumed that if someone cared enough, they would find an appropriate video; that presumption was proven correct. But I never expected anyone to do anything, certainly not to get so incredibly butt-hurt by mild sarcasm.

    • Drunemeton@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      1 month ago

      She does have the truly AWFUL job of being a women of color that our nation is depending on to beat one of the worst once elected, twice impeached former presidents.

    • davidagain@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 month ago

      In British English, Trump means (1) the sound an elephant makes or (2) a fart, particularly a noisy one. If you trump your own horn it means you’re boastful and think of yourself higher than other people do.

      President Trump = President Fart.
      Still funny after all these years, despite the looming fascism.

  • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
    16·
    1 month ago

    The Indian (Sanskrit) name is pronounced ka-ma-laa (meaning lotus), with no stress, and no gap in between the syllables. The first two 'a’s are pronounced like the ‘u’ in rum, while the last is the same sound but longer (so like the ‘a’ in calm).

    The US Presidential candidate’s name is pronounced the way she likes, which in this case is closer to ko-ma-laa.

    • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
      5·
      1 month ago

      Every word has stress. You probably mean the first phoneme is stressed. And the “rum” sound you’re looking for is called the “schwa”

      • Paraneoptera@sopuli.xyz
        6·
        1 month ago

        Not in classical Sanskrit. Vedic Sanskrit had pitch accent, which had been lost by the classical Sanskrit era. English has stress accent. But many languages do not have stress accent, and either have pitch accent or syllables are not accented at all.

      • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        1 month ago

        Every word has stress.

        In most Indian languages, most words are unstressed. There is a distinction between long and short syllables, but that comes from vowel length, not stress. A few words (like him-AA-la-ya) do have stress, but this is the exception and usually happens due to conjugation.

        You probably mean the first phoneme is stressed.

        No, kamala is unstressed.

        And the “rum” sound you’re looking for is called the “schwa”

        Yes.

  • LalSalaamComrade@lemmy.mlEnglish
    15·
    1 month ago

    /kəmələ/ is how it is said. Those weird gyphs are IPA symbols, not sure if they’re part of any European languages that uses Latin as their alphabet.

    The issue with English is that it is a non-phonetic language. In English, ‘a’ can sound either like æ, eɪ, ɑː, ɔː, etc (refer IPA). The specific ‘a’ sound in Kamala has a name, by the way - it is called schwa (ə).

    I’m pretty sure a French or a German wouldn’t butcher this name, as their alphabets are pretty consistent in phonetic pronunciation - they just map fine with Indian languages, like take for example, Hindi - ‘a’ -> अ, ‘i’ -> इ, ‘e’ -> ए, ‘o’ -> ओ, etc.

    In Devanagari, it is written as कमला (ka + ma + laa), which is the feminine form of कमल (ka + ma + la). In Hindi, every varnmala by default has a short ‘a’ - adding a ा turns this into a longer ‘aa’ sound (क् + अ -> क (ka), क् + आ -> का (kaa)).

    Yes, I know that Kamala is probably half-Dravidian (Tamil, or Telugu, I think), but it really doesn’t matter a lot - sure, there’s some differences between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, one of which being the schwa deletion, but apart from that, most letters are almost similar in function.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
      10·
      1 month ago

      It’s 'cause we took the letters from Latin, which actually had 5 vowels, and applied it to a Germanic language which, in my dialect, has 17.

      We also standardised the spelling in patches hundreds of years ago, and never updated it, but that’s a sort of separate issue.