On language
Here in India where languages have scripts quite different from the rest of the world, the characters (or syllables) are phonetic. So when you use English to spell out words in local languages, the pronunciation comes out quite differently. This thought struck me while at a station called Vilé Parlé, which without the accented e, sounds like a sinister place. Then again, there are the English sounds like ‘z’ which speakers of some native languages find it difficult to pronounce correctly. Interestingly enough, cultures with a deep Indo-European influence seem to have assimilated these differences quite well. Konkani, as spoken in Goa, uses a lot of Portuguese words. Of course, the language shows a variation as you move from north to south. The dialects (or flavours, as I like to call them) of Konkani that I’m familiar with have a significant vocabulary of Portuguese words, which have been used as they are or slightly corrupted. But these have very European pronunciations which are also spoken quite accurately by Konkani speakers. Language tends to be handed down through family (or parentage) but society can impact it quite significantly as seen above.
