Saturday, March 05, 2005

andamu: Babel

[Link]: "Of course the real fun starts when you have an English word - let's say a road name given during the colonial period: Cenotaph Road. Let it sit around for a hundred years and sink into people's everyday usage, let it be used in the local newspapers in the local alphabet (Tamil in this instance) and then ask a sign painter to climb a rickety ladder and repaint, in the Roman alphabet, the name, and you end up quite logically with Sanetop Road (bearing in mind that Tamil makes no distinction between p and f)."