why is Ram spelled Rama and why is Mahabharat spelled Mahabharata and why does gura has a r instead of a d and why is there an H in gazel it is not gazel right what is going on were the British idiots thank you he went with r Mahabharat all of the classics and then ended with an Udu word gazel but why yes so I mean I used to think that well British were idiots and they didn't know how to spell things and they didn't also want to learn careful we do have a British audience I used to think they're idiots okay for example anymore UD mandum was too complex for them so they made it ITI oh yes okay VRA became B because they couldn't be bothered to be fair to them UD mandal B or V they long words man the point is in the case of Rama they were not being idiots okay there is a really good reason for that really okay and that has to do with Sanskrit pronunciations okay so imagine that I write R and a mo okay one after the other d nagari d nagari script Ro and mo how would you pronounce it uh RAM can you imagine any other pronunciation of that you can't no because most modern North Indian languages they shorten the end right because really what I have written is a RMA why don't you call it R why are you calling it rum because that's how I have been taught to read words and because in Hindi and to some extent in marati and a whole bunch of other North Indian languages that is what we do the H sound at the end is chopped off it is that sound is called AA okay and what we are doing is schw deletion or schwas sop okay we're chopping off thewwa but that is not true in Sanskrit in Sanskrit if the word ends in a letter you have to pronounce the whole letter so it is Ram it is not Ram it is Ram okay r R and Mahabharata Mahabharata if you hear a Sanskrit scholar like Dr vi de he says it like that Mahabharata oh okay this also kind of explains why in the southern languages in some or most of the Southern languages uh my name you my name ends with an a it's Shri and not Shri because the schad deltion that North Indian languages made most of the South Indian languages did not so they get very uncomfortable when you drop the a right right uh and that's why that a is uh there at the end and marati is somewhere halfway in between right the marati people won't like it when I say it but they're half South Indian and half North Indian right so that's why marati some words have the shwah deltion and some words don't have the schwar deltion that's why for example M uh there are names like arti a Hindi speaker will sayti a marati person will say arti oh Mani versus manasi and for the same reason in Hindi you would say harar Mahadev but in marati it is har har Mahadev that makes sense and is that why all Sanskrit words should always end with this schwa that you mentioned no but the thing about Sanskrit is that when they want you to remove the shua they will make it explicit like how like if the leg of the last letter is broken that's called a Halen by the way so Su swagatam right the m has a Halen at the end so that's how you know that you are supposed to pronounce it suswagatam not sus Swagat right right so Sanskrit makes it obvious unlike these modern languages correct correct and South Indian languages also make this obvious because in Canada as far as I know it is called a v what basically means pressed which is basically you are ending the letter ending the sound before completing it uh the schw deletion then happens only at the end with these Helens is that it not really okay schad delici in the middle of the words gives some really fascinating effects like what so let's take the example of versus write it out in dagi they are the same they're exactly the same except that if you mix up the pronunciations it meaning changes it'll just be very weird right it's you can't say or you can't say understand what I'm saying right the the the uh uh The Habit is so strong that you can't even pronounce it wrong that's how right I mean the other example is just dag right you said ha but it is Dea nagari in Sanskrit it is Dea nagari whereas if you say it in Hindi it's D nagari right so and there are like a couple of schwas deleted in the the V and the go both have schwas deleted in marati there is a famous uh example where there is a surname H bamar right but if you do the schad dels wrong it suddenly becomes Bak Makar and if you you go and ask for bmar and they know bamar they won't realize you're talking about the same person they'll say he doesn't live here go away so let's talk about the other weirdnesses in our spellings right okay it always bothered me why is sadii written with an R why is it not sad di but don't we call it sari here in it is not sari okay that's just fancy English people who don't know how to pronounce things it is clearly s it is clearly good but the problem there is that it's a sound which is halfway between a r and a du okay the three different sounds r r du du and oh okay so it is not s okay s is wrong s s oh s so this sound is halfway between an r and a d and English is just not doesn't have enough letters to capture the sound so what are you going to do you had to pick you either pick a d on this side or you pick an R you had to make half the people unhappy anyway right the reason we get unhappy about that is because when we are taught in school the DU sound is taught to us as a duh with a DOT under it right so that gives us the impression that this is just a variation of duh but it is not it is a sound halfway between R and du ah okay so it's not du with a dot but it's r I mean we could have called it a r with a DOT and called it right so then people would have been much happier with the spellings Fair Point fair point so that explains the SAR sadii thing that you talking about at the beginning the gura G gura gura thing you talking about uh but what about guzzle there is an H in guzzle why isn't it guzzle with a G only correct so first of all it is not guzzle so we don't understand why it is with a g h right okay again the problem there is that there is a third sound it is neither G nor G huh it is a a g that you say from youring right so it is sometimes called gutal it is called fenial right so it is that sound doesn't exist in dagar it doesn't exist in Indian languages it has come to us from Persian right the mugal uh brought so if you hear closely you will hear they're saying right and that's why again English is too lame to be able to capture that sound so just to make sure that you don't pronounce it gzel like the unwashed masses they put in a little H there to indicate there is guzzle gazel right and very similarly there is a q sound which is different from C Sound okay have you ever wondered why kuub Min is written with a Q instead of KU t k Min I never really wondered it but because it is not C it's it's C coming from in here right again similar sounds okay yeah I mean you know but like gazel why didn't they put just an h no it's not KH KH would have meant something else KH was already taken so they couldn't use the H trick here but just so happened that there was an extra Q lying around which they used for this purpose look Q is a very useful letter in Scrabble okay so don't dis you RIS you uh sorry bad joke so that explains the H in guzzle speaking of an extra H uh the South Indians tend to use an extra H in some of their names like SMI so again it is that not Smita okay it is Smita even in South okay it just spelled that way and there is a good reason for that it is not that South Indians are a little idiotic okay so I never said that this is a story of four sounds okay t t t and t t t t t correct okay North Indian languages have these four sounds correct and in English you have to sort of adjust just using a t and a h okay how are you going to adjust four sounds with just two letters good point so you have to compromise somewhere correct the compromise we have chosen as North Indians is that we are not going to distinguish between T and T and we are not going to distinguish between T and T right so when you write a t it could be either t or to and same thing with th correct okay South Indians had a better situation okay they don't have four sounds okay they have only two sounds okay okay they have t and they have t they don't have the T and T sounds okay in Tamil so if you have only two sounds and you have two letters to use them what are you going to do obviously you'll use T for one of them and you'll use th for the other one that explains it so they don't have the problems we have because they have fewer sounds they're happy when they see a t it clearly means to them T and when they see a th it clearly means a th so they don't understand why all these North Indian girls are named Smita okay okay and why are you Shri Kant Shri can't do anything about that y but listen this thing about Tamil having fewer alphabets or sounds I I'm not sure because Tamil has an extra sound or a couple of extra sounds in yeah yeah no no I'm not saying they're poor and they can't afford all these sounds okay again I never said stop channel in fact I don't know if you have ever seen Tamil spelled as t a m i z h t h a m i z h I have seen yes correct oh yeah the th already we explained why because really it should be th and not just T but the Zed H have you ever seen the zh and what the hell I mean Zed H is doesn't sound anywhere close to L I have I have a small idea of why zh but I still I don't want to take any risks so no risks if you look that zedit sound shows up in many different places right have you heard of the city Kik k o z h i I have heard of calic which is spelled kic kod but I'm sure it's not pronounced kic kod exactly right the main problem there is the fact that Tamil has a a sound that's the extra one and extra sound it is not the of marati yeah okay it's a different Tamil even I can't pronounce it so Tamil people please forgive me but is that already L is taken yeah right and they needed some way to indicate that this is a sound so they chose z z h okay because tongue is Twisted inside right so the point is that the Zed I mean see English has so few alphabets that what are you going to do you don't have too much choice you just have to do these weird things like the Spanish people use x for C Sound the problem they faced was that there's an sound which is different from l so you can't use l for it right and English is just so poor in alphabets that they don't have enough alphabets what are you going to do so then they had to pick something else they picked Zed H all the way to Z they went yeah that's okay but that's the point it is a sound which don't know we can't pronounce but it is a sound okay that's where the comes from yeah it's it's somewhere between L and R and Y if I remember my basically put your tongue back like a r but then don't touch it up and you say yeah without touching it Tam that's what I think it is we are really sorry we've tried but we can't get that pronunciation right I know and terribly sorry about it we'll learn we'll definitely learn because here at Future IQ we are all about learning constant learning that's the Endeavor so much Gan this G this guy has given today so muchan this is another problem that as a person growing up in Maharashtra I faced constantly right that Gan in Hindi the gear sound yeah gear sound the gear sound actually marati people called right d and yanar correct right and I couldn't understand I mean which is correct uh I have no idea answer is neither of them is correct I knew that in Sanskrit it is actually half J and half y okay oh that's why it's also written like J and then a bit exactly not just that but if you have ever seen Sanskrit Scholars write the word Y in English it is y a j n a not y a g y yag oh y is Hindi Y is marati but y right so there is a j there because really that's a j sound yanar right but you try to pronounce it it is really difficult to pronounce right so obviously Hindi marati people took the easy way out they just changed the sound to something that's easier to pronounce Unfortunately they couldn't agree and one of them picked GE the other picked n one of them picked R the other picked Ru and the actual sound in Sanskrit was R if you don't know what we are talking about the episode we line it up for you there's a bonus by the way uh leave all the Indian languages aside even within English there is something that we Indians get terribly wrong and that is the pronunciations of V and W right I mean I I never really understood why do they have two different letters for the same sound okay this is coming from the Indian uh uh understanding of languages because in Indian languages there's only one sound that is W but the thing is it's V or W which one is it and English managed to separate those two sounds out into V which is V and W which is W you're making the same sound again and again and pretending that they are different sounds okay bite your v's and kiss your W's bite your V so V the V sound is V your lower lip is touching the upper tooth right V whereas the W sound is kissing you're kissing your w w water right so I never thought water falls on you you get wet but when your dog causes any problems you go to the vet yes so it's vet who got wet you can't hear the difference between them I can't hear the difference between them but for westerners they are as different as chalk and cheese yes so whenever you go to the Western countries make sure you bite your vs and kiss your W's and wear a West in the west and there so but to summarize usually there is a good reason why the spelling of something might be funny right and if you dig deeper into it you will find a fascinating story and you will learn something uh about the background of our languages and the fascinating history and if you're ready to learn more about our languages and uh the D nagari scripts specifically we'll line it up for you next um Shri Kant naen naven future IQ