Tonguing a Foreign Tounge

Perfecting the craft of scholarship alone does not make you a true scholar. A hundred citations may not make a piece speak for a reality. Opposing an oppressive order, for instance, epistemological imperialism, does not make you a democrat. You may only be caricaturing the imperialists seeking your little fiefdom. Or worse, you may be trying to capture the dissenting space for the same imperialists you are pretending to resist.

 
The vocal system of a person is attuned to their cultural production of sounds and not to others. Only through a very long and conscious practice, people train their tongue to pronounce the words of a foreign language. It is no less than torturing one's tongue.

 
We are also cultural beings. rather, with a longer history than most and as all cultural beings do, we can also twist the pronunciations, idioms and everything, which goes into making a language in spoken and written forms to our comfort. There is no problem as long as the other or a native speaker of a language can understand what we are trying to communicate, even if the listener has to make some extra effort. In fact, they should have corrected their language by making the spellings of words match their phonetic forms or vice versa. If they do not bother about the mismatch between how they write and speak, why should we?

We surf the internet and find many acceptable variants of any language and ways of pronouncing even proper nouns. Strangely, the very senior scholar does not know this.

 
Niraj Kumar Jha