Do Tamilians Think or Tink? A Response For Justice Katju

 Those who follow Justice Katju on Facebook are bound to have noticed his frequent assertion that “Tamilians cannot think. They can only tink”. Apparently, according to Justice Katju, Tamil does not have the ‘th’ sound required for ‘think’.

At first glance, Justice Katju seems to be making a ridiculous assertion. I spent the first 18 years of my life in Tamil Nadu, studied Tamil as a second language in school and can vouch for the fact that Tamil does have the ‘th’ sound required to say “think”. However, Justice Katju isn’t a newbie to Tamil either. Justice Katju took a diploma course in Tamil while he was at Allahabad University and later spent a year at Annamalai University in Chennai learning spoken Tamil. He also served as the Chief Justice of the Madras High Court in 2004-2005.

Having seen Justice Katju’s Facebook status updates on this point many times over the past few months, I kept wondering what is it that makes Justice Katju pontificate thus.

Then one day, the penny dropped. I remembered an old conversation with a friend named Lata, a native Hindi speaker, who married a South Indian. My relatives keep spelling my name as Latha, she complained to me. Is it a big deal? I asked. Isn't Latha phonetically closer to the way your name is pronounced, rather than Lata, I wondered? No, “my name is Lata, not Latha’’, she told me, pronouncing the T in name with a soft ‘th’. Sounds like Latha to me, I said. ‘No,’ came the retort. ‘It’s L-A-T-A.’ I was left none the wiser then.

I’ve had similar conversations with friends from north of Deccan regarding names like Nithin, Sunitha and Latha. Heck, even with my own name, it was so common to have people in Tamil Nadu write it as Vinodh or even Vinoth. My parents, like many thousands of South Indians who copied the names of North Indian movie actors when naming their kids, copied Mr. Khanna’s spelling as well. If they weren’t Vinod Khanna fans and had to spell Vinod, the chances are that they would have spelt it as Vinodh.

It took me many years to figure out the Lata/Latha, Sunita/Sunitha, Vinod/Vinodh conundrum.

In written Tamil, there’s only one alphabet for ta/tha (த), while Hindi has four versions of ta/tha, namely [त थ द and ध]. Similarly, Tamil only one alphabet each for ka (க), cha (ச), da (ட) and pa (ப), even though in spoken Tamil, each of these alphabets can be expressed in multiple ways. Hindi has four versions of each of the alphabets ka (क, ख, ग, घ), cha (च, छ, ज, झ), da (ट, ठ, ड, ढ), ta (त, थ, द, ध) and pa (प, फ, ब, भ).

In Malayalam, which is a mix of Tamil and Sanskrit, the alphabets correspond exactly to the Hindi alphabets, but all Malayalees spell names like Sunitha, Latha etc. the way the Tamils do – when writing in English, that is. I assume this is the position with Kannada and Telugu speakers too. My father, who grew up in Kerala and learnt basic Hindi as a student, pronounces the D in Hindi the same way as he pronounces the D in Dictionary.

For many Hindi speakers, spelling Lata with a T makes it phonetically closer to the relevant Hindi alphabet (the first Ta in the four Hindi variants of ta/tha) than a TH. For Tamils and other south Indians, spelling Latha and Sunitha with a TH makes more sense, since a T is usually pronounced as a hard T, as in the word “Time”.

The TH in think requires to be accompanied by a small exhalation of breath and is not, strictly speaking, the Tamil THA, though it is phonetically closer to the Tamil THA than the hard T in time. If a Hindi speaker had to write “Think’’ in Hindi, he would presumably use the second THA (थ) from out of the four Hindi variants of ta/tha. When Justice Katju says Tamils don’t think, but they tink, he is possibly pointing out that Tamil doesn’t have an alphabet equivalent to the second Tha (थ) in the four Hindi variants of ta/tha. When he says Tamil tink, he isn’t using the hard T in the word Time, but the first Ta [त) in the four Hindi variants of ta/tha, the one used when writing names like Lata or Sunita. For Justice Katju, the T in tink matches the T in Lata, whilst for a South Indian, the T in tink would match the T in time and the TH in think would match the TH in Latha or Sunitha.

If you disagree with my analysis, please let me know, I could be wrong. I don’t claim to be a linguistic expert. And please let’s keep the conversation civil.