Take the innocuously confusing pair of words bhAvamu (loosely - opinion,
thought, idea), and bhavamu (loosely, puTTinadi, pApamu!), and the
other set, jalamu (water), and jAlamu (gumpu, vala [as in jAlari]), and
all the several other meanings these pairs of words have, and presto,
it looks like you can obtain almost any meaning you want, for the
compound word. As Alice says, it can mean whatever you want it to mean!
Needless to say, the trouble is compounded (pun intended) with the
poverty of vowels in the English language to uniquely distinguish
between the pairs, and the relative unfamiliarity of people with the
"standard" transcription system usually employed here. On and off,
I have been known to dispatch a note on the system of transcription,
with great dispatch, I might add. Sometimes.
Before I do that here, for the benefit of those that need it, I am
tempted to say that the answer to the question:
What is an English Equivalent of "bhAva-jAlamu"?
is not an answer, but another question:
What is the context?
'cos, if you attempt to reply without knowing the context, loosely
attaching one of several meanings of the first word to one of the several
meanings of the second word, you would lose the intended meaning altogether!
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Just a small note on the "weird" way of transcription of some Indian
words in this article. This is a transcription system called RIT, which uses
lower case vowels for the "hrasva", and the upper case vowels for the
"deergha" distinction. It also uses "d, D, dh, Dh" to distinguish the sounds
in "gada", "garuDa", "bAdha-suffering", and "gADha-intense". Similarly
it uses "t, T, th, Th" to distinguish the consonant sounds in "patAka-flag",
"nATika-drama", "pathamu-path", and "pATha-lesson". Similarly,
"jalaja-lotus", and "marALa-swan", and "kanaka-gold", and "kankaNa-
bangle". Finally, "R" is used to denote the vowel sound "ru" as in
"kRshNa", "kRpa-compassion"... These are the simple rules. Thus, using
just the keyboard characters (ASCII set, not-extended) one can
unambiguously transcribe most Indian languages, including the complex
compound consonant laden words in dEvanAgari texts. Even though
originally it was developed for Telugu transcription (with an associated
Unix software that lets such material to be printed in Telugu script) by a
couple of graduate students at Rice University (Dr. Kanneganti Rama Rao
and soon-to-be-Dr. Papineni Ananda Kishore) it is applicable to most
Indian languages, and perhaps be adapted to all Indian languages, if not
ALL languages!
A little bit more:
It uses "S, s, sh" for the consonant sounds in the words "SakaTamu-cart",
"sakalamu-all", and "vishamu-poison". "ka, kha, ga, gha, ca, cha, ja, jha,
pa, pha, ba, bha, ma, ya, ra, va, ha" are used for they consonants they
intuitively indicate. For the two nasal consonants in the ka-group, and the
ca-group, "~m", and "~n" are used. For example, "pa~ncA~mgamu" - I think, out of
my lack of "total" familiarity with it.
One saving feature is the fault-tolerant feature of this scheme. It would
treat "pATa", "paaTa", "pa'Ta" as meaning the same word - song. Similarly,
either "khaakI" or "Kaakee" would be the same. I understand that the associated
software, called "RIT", which works with "LaTek" word processor has built-in
intelligence which "recognizes" telugu and english words in mixed text. I
have not used this software, and would defer to others to explain the feature.
The consonants are (I am giving in groups of five)
k K g G ~m
or k kh g gh ~m
c ch j jh ~n
or c C j J ~n
T Th D Dh N
t th d dh n
p ph b bh m
and ya ra la va Sa sha sa ha ksha
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Ramakrishna