As far as I know, Kannada and Tamil languages don't have dental cha
and dental ja and it appears that dental cha/ja are peculiar to Telugu
language. I think, Tamil and Kannada use "sa" in those words corresponding
to telugu words with dental-cha. right ?
Reg. the representation of dental ja for transliteration, I think, the
obvious choice is "z". For dental ch, my suggestion is to use "ts" -- you
could have seen Indian English Newspapers using the word Tsundur to refer
to a village in AP.
Also, I have heard ts and dental-ch pronounced interchangeably. In our
school, we used to have a teacher with name Vatsala. As I recall, her
name was pronounced by most as va[ch][ch]ala ([ch] here is dental-cha).
Further, I heard this: "..punjaalu tempi maree putsukonnaaru gada" -- this
is a dialogue from famous vara-vikrayam naaTakam.^^^
In a recent off-net discussion, Bapa Rao gaaru pointed out Prof. Budaraju
Radhakrishna's statement that with the advent of literacy, people have
been reverse-forming speech patterns from the written form. I think,
pronouncing dental cha and dental ja as palatals by literates can be
given as an example of such phenomenon. Tell me, how many literate people
do we see pronouncing [ch]aapa, zUkAlu, zampAla, ginza with dental cha
and dental ja these days ? I would say, hardly any !
By the way, I would be unsubscribing to this list on Nov 8th, tempororily
for 2 weeks, as I would be away in India for this period.
During this short stay in India, I may not really be able to pursue any
literary/linguistic interests, but if anyone has any exciting ideas, I can
try to execute any of those. Ah, during this 2-week trip, I would be
spending most of my time in Hyderabad.
Now, I must be going !
Regards,
Suresh.