I cannot see this changing anytime soon. I think from its inception, Air India’s transliteration in Devanagari has always been एअर इंडिया – see the logo. Air India’s website could have been such a rich archive of old photographs, but it’s under construction and slow to load. I could not find old photographs that showed the first instance of Hindi logos.

Surely, if India had a Y sound in it, it would have been spelt as Indiya. So who was the bright spark in the Tata empire who allowed this? I expected more from Parsis, who are generally well-versed in English.

Moreover, why does the single-syllable English word “air” become two syllables “eh- uhr” in Devanagari? If anyone at Air India cares, the transliteration should be:

ऐर इंडिआ

Try reading it aloud. That’s how we say it in English.

It Gets Worse

Other companies have caught this ailment. Take IndianOil for example. Its logo uses Devanagari. I would back-transliterate it as “Indiyan Oyal” Why not:

इंडिअन ऑईल

Let’s look at one more example, where my dad kept his money for many years – the Bank of India. Yes, you guessed right – another Indiya. The transliteration of “bank” differs between Hindi and Marathi when it comes to banks in general. The one seen here is the Hindi one, which reads “baink”. The transliteration plugin here is broken, so I can’t show how it looks in Marathi, but here’s the logo of the Bank of Maharashtra/Maharashtra Bank (they can’t make up their mind).

How many English errors can you cram into a single document? Ask the ICAI. I saw a post that asked for a technical interpretation of the following document:

GUIDELINES FOR PERMITTING THE CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS/FIRMS OF CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS TO POST THEIR PARTICULARS AT WEBSITE

For what it’s worth, it is refreshing to contrast these guidelines with the UK counterpart – see Section 250, which have a more commonsense approach.

Let’s pick some holes in this document, not to disparage the authors but as examples or poor English.

Articles

The misuse of articles (a, an, the) is apparent in the following sentences:

The Council at its meeting held in January, 2001 approved the detailed guidelinesfor posting the particulars on Website

The main problem above is “on Website”. This isn’t Hindi, so it should be “on their website”. The other problem is “approved the detailed guidelines”, where “the detailed” begs the question, “Were there some other, less detailed guidelines?” – I believe the following would convey the same meaning:

The Council at its meeting held in January 2001 approved guidelines for members’ websites.

Another one:

1. The Chartered Accountants and/or Chartered Accountants’ Firms

Let’s ignore the fact that the writer can’t decide whether “Firms” needs an initial capital or not, so both versions are used in the document.

It might have been better to say:

Chartered Accountants in sole practice or in partnerships…

Confusion

The following text is simply confusing:

(8) Display of Passport size photograph is permitted.

Is that a photograph the size of a passport, or the size of a photo that you would submit with a passport application? Should they give the dimensions in millimetres?

The writers don’t seem to know that PC monitors can have different resolutions, e.g. 1024×768 pixels, 1280×1024 etc, so the dimension of an image should be specified in pixels.

Thankfully, the following text was removed:

Except the neither link to nor information about any other Website is permitted.

We’ll never know what the author intended to convey.

And now for the technical mess of a paragraph that led me to this topic:

3.The Chartered Accountants and/or Chartered Accountants’ Firms would ensure that their Websites are run on a “pull” model and not a “push” model of the technology to ensure that any person who wishes to locate the Chartered Accountants or Chartered Accountants’ firms would only have access to the information and the information should be provided only on the basis of specific “pull” request.

I’d love to meet the person who can explain the above. Let’s try to second-guess the writer here:

• If a user searches within Google and finds a member’s website, is that a “pull request”?
• What is meant by “to ensure that any person who wishes to locate the Chartered Accountants or Chartered Accountants’ firms would only have access to the information”? As opposed to what?
• Are they saying that if you went to a member website, it would be completely blank except for some search box and you would have to ask a series of questions, e.g.
  • What services do you offer? (Is that the pull?)
  • Where are you located?
  • Do you have any passport-sized photos of yourselves?

Another equally baffling paragraph:

4.The Chartered Accountants and/or Chartered Accountants’ Firms should ensure that none of the information contained in the Website be circulated on their own or through E.mail or by any other mode or technique except on a specific “pull” request.

What does “circulated on their own” mean? Do we see words flying through the air of their own accord? If they meant to say, “Do not spam or solicit for work through email”, they should have said that.

In earlier paragraphs, the members were subjected to the tortuous either/or clause “The Chartered Accountants and/or Chartered Accountants’ Firms” but now firms seem exempt from the following rule:

5.The Chartered Accountants would also not issue any circular or any other advertisement or any other material of any kind whatsoever by virtue of which they solicit people to visit their Website.

Whose logo are they referring to in the sentence below?

7) Since Chartered Accountants in practice/firms of Chartered Accountants are not permitted to use logo with effect from 1st July, 1998, they cannot use logo on Website also.

More Hindi English here. You need an article before “logo” but in this case you need to mention a specific logo. You do not end a sentence with “also”, except when speaking Indian English at the bus stop. I think they mean that a member cannot display the logo of the ICAI. Surely they can display their own logo?

Another common Indian English error:

9) The members may include articles, professional information, professional updation and other matters of larger importance or of professional interest.

Updation? Which dictionary contains that word? What is wrong with using the word “update”? Sadly, ill-educated Indians have absorbed that word en masse and it can be seen in the Indian English Dictionary. But of course – the venerable Times of India uses this abomination, so what hope is there for the common man?

Again, there was no need to begin the paragraph with “The”. Simply “Members may” would suffice. Several other paragraphs can dispense with the definite article at the beginning of sentences.

Another horror of a paragraph:

11) The chat rooms can be provided which permit chatting amongst members of the ICAI and between Firms and its clients. The confidentiality protocol would have to be observed.

Why not say:

Chat rooms are permitted, provided that client confidentiality is maintained.

My oh my:

13) The listing on suitable search engine should be permitted. However, the field of search should be restricted only to the field of “Chartered Accountants” or “CA” or “Indian CA”, “Indian CPA”, “Indian Chartered Accountant” or any permutation or combination related thereto.

Is the wise Council of the ICAI suggesting that end users such as myself can only use Google to search for the above words if my objective is to find a long-suffering Indian CA? I recommend that they learn more about search engines before writing these gems.

Upto

23) The Website should mention the date upto which it is updated

Only in India do they join the words “up to”. Clue: this isn’t “unto”. Keep the words apart.

The guidelines have many more errors, but I’ll leave it at that.

There are some old posts elsewhere that tell you how to view (and write) Devanagari posts in WordPress. Mostly they say you should enable FireFox as follows: Tools > Options > Content > Default Font Times New Roman > Advanced > Western > Default Character Encoding = Unicode (UTF-8) If only it were that easy today (WP 2.7.1). My problem wasn’t the above – I could view other blogs containing Devanagari words but my post below was not saving the Devanagari contents. Here is my How-To:

• Use the Google Indic Transliteration tool to write in Devanagari. But you have to copy/paste the text into WordPress.
• Install and activate the Google Indic Transliteration WordPress Plugin. This adds a check box in the WP post editor. (You have to be in HTML edit mode.) If you check Hindi, you can type in Hindi directly within the post. It does not have Marathi, e.g. ळ so the Google tool is better.
• Edit wp-config.php to replace the line below with the one after it (copy it and place // to make the original line a comment)
  //define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
  define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ”);
  (Those are two single quotes after CHARSET’,)
• Open the MySQL database with phpMyAdmin (supplied with cPanel) and check the Collation language – usually it is latin1_swedish_ci.
• Select the Operations tab and scroll down to Collation. Make it utf8_general_ci. This will suffice to enable Devanagarifor new posts.
• Old posts prior to the change will need to be re-edited. You can do it in phpMyAdmin. Choose from the left menu the table called wp_posts. Then select the Browse tab and find the post you want to edit. Click the pencil icon, make the changes and save. That’s it! सकसेस

Indian languages (at least the North Indian ones) have only one letter “wa” (व) to cover the letters V and W, therefore many Indians mispronounce words that contain the letter “v”.

The “wa” sound is made with the lips forming a circle as you open the mouth.

The “va” sound requires you to place your lower lip behind the upper front teeth and release the lip as you say it.

In Marathi, the V sound is transliterated as व्ह (“vh”) – no idea why, because it causes people to inject the “h” sound when none exists.

Laloo Yadav’s speech in Parliament is a fine example of an ailing Indian English. It kicks off this website’s first post. Enjoy!