Are Indians incapable of pronouncing multi-syllabic words?

Tamil Nadu’s decision to change the ‘English’ spellings of 1,018 places to bring them in line with their local pronunciation is unexceptionable. There is no reason to believe that all Indians cannot enunciate place names the way as they were originally intended. After all, Indians do not have the excuse that the British had — of being familiar only with English names and, therefore, incapable of getting their tongues around anything multi-syllabic.

Even the Welsh town named Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch has been shortened to Llanfair PG. But that Welsh spelling and the new ones formulated by the TN government highlight the same thing: the inadequacy of the Latin alphabet — that English and a host of other languages use — to accurately spell out the more complicated pronunciations of many others.

If Welsh spellings end up looking like someone has fallen asleep on the keyboard thanks to the surfeit of repetitive consonants, the double vowels and consonants of the new spellings of Tamil places have the same effect. Eekkattuththaangal, Keezhappoonggudi, Mayilaappoor, Koyampuththoor and other such spellings will leave many none the wiser. Having evolved our own genre of English, it may now be time to develop our own diacritical marks: a few dots and dashes could save a lot of letters — and paint too.