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I was on a flight, reading a book. The passenger beside me, all of a sudden, asked, “Do you like Kamuh?”
I was startled. “What? Who?”
He pointed to the book I was holding.
Up until that moment, I didn’t know how “Albert Camus” (the French philosopher and novelist) was pronounced. I had only read the name on the internet. I wanted to read his books, so I just bought one. I had never heard anyone say his name, so the sound of it was unknown to me.
This was French, though. The confusion is understandable. But my relationship with pronunciation has been quite complicated. Even with English words.
I didn’t study in English medium. Until class 12, most things I read and wrote were in my mother tongue. The only time I needed to read or write in English was when the name of the subject was (literally) English. Being a slightly better than average student, I could write English modestly well, by government-school standards. But speaking was a different ball game. Writing was Test cricket: slow, deliberate, plenty of time to think. Speaking was T20.
I started speaking slowly. For the first two or three weeks, there were interruptions while I spoke. But I understood where I was going wrong, and how to improve. I was thinking in my mother tongue, translating, and only then speaking the sentence. I realised I needed to get rid of that middle layer. I had to start thinking in English. Only then could I get good at speaking it.
I fell in love with The Beatles and classic English rock around the same time, and started watching TV shows. So everything made the process easier. Mostly easier.
There was one minor niggle that made me very careful about how I spoke: pronunciation. I had (and still have!) a thick Bengali accent. But that was never really the problem. The problem was the words I had read many times but had rarely heard anyone say.
For example, “merely”. I had used it a thousand times in essays. But I never bothered about how it was pronounced. I remember saying it like “may-ray-lee”. In reality, it is more like “meer-ly”. One day, some light banter from college friends corrected it.
It took me a long time to see that these are two different things. Accent is how I sound. Pronunciation is whether the other person hears the word I meant. “May-ray-lee” in a Bengali accent and “may-ray-lee” in a BBC accent are equally wrong. “Meer-ly” in a Bengali accent is perfectly right.
Recently, I saw a different version of the same problem in an unexpected place. I was writing a strategy doc for a project with a frontier LLM. The code was already shared with the model, so I let it take a pass. What it generated was below the standard. Every word was spelt right, and would have been pronounced right too. There were a lot of words. But absolutely no substance.
Over time, my relationship with the way I speak has evolved. The biggest contributors are the people who speak fluently, with perfect pronunciation and a polished accent, but have little to no substance. Like the LLM writing a strategy doc.
Another big part has been played by the people I have come across who speak eloquently. In their own accent. And care only about the substance they are putting out into the world. They made me realise that my accent is part of my identity. A product of my childhood. Of who I am. It is not something that needs desperate fixing with fake manoeuvres of “foreign” accents.
Pronunciation is different. I still look up a word before I say it out loud for the first time. That part is worth fixing. Merely so that the other person hears the word I meant.
As for Camus, I have since learnt how to say Camus. Nobody has asked me about him since.
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A very crisply-written piece! Solid points, and I really enjoyed reading it.