On spellings

During my stay in Delhi this summer, road trips were a constant source of alternating disappointment, nay chagrin, and amusement, thanks to the profuse flowering of misspellings on boards and traffic signs all over the city. I remember being put through endless vākya-śuddhi ("sentence correction") exercises while studying Hindi in school, all designed to "purify" us students' Hindi of the common errors made both by native speakers and language learners. And sadly, virtually every public notice, or billboard I saw would have qualified for inclusion in one of the exercises. The single most frequently misspelled word I saw was kṛpayā, which was invariably spelled kṛpyā everywhere. (Unsurprisingly, this mistake was also frequently included in our sentence correction exercises.)

A month ago, my reaction was a derisive laugh and a sad shake of the head, but today, while running through Sanskrit declensions, I realized something that has actually raised a really, really hard question to which I have no answer: what is the purpose behind insisting on good spelling? Let me first dive into what happened, before trying to explore these murky waters any further. (Why not chain a few aquatic metaphors together, eh?)

In Sanskrit, the instrumental singular of a feminine noun whose stem ends in -ā is -ayā; more precisely, the feminine noun kṛpā (meaning "mercy" or "pity") takes the instrumental form kṛpayā. This declined word has directly entered Hindi as an indeclinable word, functioning essentially as a replacement for "please". A polite, formal imperative construction in Hindi can be implemented by using kṛpayā with the subjunctive of the verb. Following the general pronunciation drift in North Indian languages away from Classical Sanskrit pronunciation, the word kṛpayā is pronounced krpyā, or perhaps even more accurately as kripyā.

And therein lies the rub: what's the "right" spelling of the word? In principle, Hindi is supposed to be spelled phonetically in the Devanagari script. Let us ignore for now the fact that the Devanagari script was designed for Sanskrit and not for Hindi and hence is inadequate for representing many of the most common sounds (particularly the vowels) in Hindi, and focus instead on this one word kṛpayā / kṛpyā / kripyā. According to the general principle of Hindi spelling, this word should be spelled according to either the second or the third spelling, since virtually nobody pronounces it with three syllables any more. Case closed! But if that's the case, why have a succession of Hindi teachers drilled it into me that the correct spelling is in fact the first one, spelled the way the word would have been pronounced in Classical India? The answer is that preserving the original spelling offers the educated Hindi speaker some insight into the etymology of the word, allowing him / her to deduce that (1) the word is taken from Sanskrit; (2) the word is a declined form of a Sanskrit noun (which is also used in Hindi); (3) the word's usage in Hindi is motivated by its original use in Sanskrit. (This is by no means the only case in Hindi where a Sanskrit form or syntactic pattern has been ossified, in a sense. Michael Coulson argues in Teach Yourself Sanskrit that Hindi's pattern of split ergativity is a direct consequence of the Sanskrit tendency to use the past participle in place of the finite verb. And I suspect that the immediate future tense in Hindi is also a direct imitation of Sanskrit's periphrastic future, although I have no source for this as this is but my own uneducated guess.)

All fine and dandy, but is etymology a good enough reason to violate the law of phonetic spelling? One indirect argument in favor of etymology is that Hindi spelling is already a gross violation of phonetic spelling. For instance, the sentence "I'm going" is written "mai̐ jā rahā hū̐" (apologies; I couldn't think of any other way to indicate the nasal vowel), but is really pronounced "mĕ jā rāu̐" or something similar, and there isn't actually a good way to indicate this pronunciation in Devanagari. And while this could be fixed to some extent by adding extra symbols to the script, we face a more intractable problem when choosing phonetic spelling: do we let every individual spell words as s/he sees (or should I say, "says") fit, or should we agree on a standardized dialect or pronunciation of Hindi according to which all words will be spelled? This really is a no-win situation. With the first choice we lose any sense of coherent spelling, and end up back in the era of Early Modern English with its funny looking (to us) spellings that reflected regional and cultural variations; further, we lose the valuable information that etymology and seemingly archaic spellings preserve for the educated reader. On the other hand, the second choice is really a solution only on paper (again, no pun intended), for it still forces arbitrary pronunciations on individuals whose native dialects are different from the standard dialect; further, it is a choice almost certain to result in the rise of archaic spellings over time as the standard dialect evolves while the standard spelling likely adheres closely to the original.

I've spent a lot of words arguing about a misspelled signboard when I should have been sleeping. At this point, all I have done is ensure that I'm going to horribly fail any new vākya-śuddhi exercises my teachers set me! I will continue this discussion tomorrow, after recharging my batteries.