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Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

I hate it when people mispronounce/misspell Yazhi. It's pronounced using the the most unique feature of the language - "zh" instead of "L" just like Tamil itself (it's actually Thamizh). The original wikipedia page:

https://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%AF%E0%AE%BE%E0%AE%B3%E0...

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I'm coming around to the idea that we _should_ really be using "l" or maybe "r" instead of "zh" for the ழ. At least it's closer in pronunciation and there's a chance someone can work their way to it. Zh is like "we don't have an exact match so we'll repurpose a letter we don't use". It has no phonetic relevance.

Tamil is my mother tongue and I agree 100%. And like insisting that sentences shouldn't end with a preposition, or "you should say GNU/Linux, not Linux", it's no way to make friends and influence people.

Whenever someone says "actually", it's hard not to think of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGvw-E4OtOA

Sure, referencing a meme in a language relate discourse, should make people take you seriously /s

>About

> I pronounce my name as kroo-PAH-krun. In IPA it’s /kruːˈpɑːkrən/

Rules for thee, but not for me :))))

Yeah I shouldn't have posted The Office meme. My bad. Unfortunately it's too late to edit my original comment.

All good :)

Yes. Very few non-Dravidian languages spoken in India, have that specific sound.

The only exception I can think of is Marathi. The 'el' in 'sakal' is roughly the same.

Wow, I didn't know this. Thanks for sharing!

Marathi also has the ch vs ts thing. Similar issues turns up in transliterating Cyrillic -- Chebyshev vs Tschebyshev.

Technically it’s a retroflex approximant [1] and is found in many places (often not as a separate character or phoneme).

But I think we’ve hijacked a cultural thread with enough phonetics for now!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_retroflex_approximant

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