On the auspicious occasion of Navratri, I am publishing a blog unravelling the mysteries of English pronunciations.

This was started as a column in Hindi for Navbharat Times a few years ago and some people urged me to write it for English readers as well. The English version may also become a published book in the future but for now, for the next nine days, I will add a new chapter discussing the patterns between the spoke and the written word in the English language —

 It all started with a visit by Mr. Avadhesh Vyas to our dept. (Dept. of Applied Linguistics). He was surprised that all his life he had pronounced ‘l’ in the word ‘almond’. He was unaware that it is silent and should not be pronounced. He also found a lot of words were tricky when it came to correspondence between the spelling of the word and its pronunciation. He thought being a linguist, I would be able to help Hindi speakers learn the correct pronunciation. I promised to look into the matter. I too was surprised to see the erratic nature of English spellings and its pronunciation. There are 44 significant sounds in English and only 26 letters to express them. Mapping the 44 sounds onto 26 letters is a daunting task. That is not all. We cannot establish any rule to learn spellings; e.g. in school we were taught that if there is a c it should be followed by  ei  as in receive, perceive etc. and  ie in other places as in believe, retrieve etc. Then what about their and either-neither or eight and height? In Devanagari script, we pronounce everything as it is written, with a few exceptions. That’s why it becomes very difficult for a Devanagari user to read English. It was decided that  we write about it (the gap) in the Navbharat Times in a serialized way. We began with one letter and many pronunciations. Despite being well received, they discontinued it after a few weeks. However, readers requested me to put this information in a book form so that all the examples could be found in one place. Many who saw this exercise felt that it would be useful to any English learner, even the native speaker, as there is a big gap between the spoken word and its written form. Hence, I wrote this English version. I was helped in this endeavour by Dr. Shailesh Pundalik who went through my manuscript and made several suggestions, and Dr. Pratima Dave and Trupti Nisar who helped me from time to time. I must also thank my husband Mr. Vishnu Pai who kept  reminding me that I should finish it as soon as possible.  It sat in a manuscript form, for a whole decade until my daughter decided to add it to my blog as a series of posts. I am hoping to publish this in the book format at some point, in both English and of course,  Hindi. Fingers crossed…