Pronouncing the Veep’s Name
Apparently even she gets it wrong.
Slate‘s Scaachi Koul wants you to know “You’re Still Saying Kamala Harris’ Name Wrong.” Her setup is familiar:
For most of my life, as is true for a lot of Indians, no one in my family used my real name. Instead, I was called by a nickname too stupid to even tell white people about it. Most members of my family have their own pet name: My mother used to go by Moni, my niece is Bubaloo, I have Pinky Aunties and Sweetu Didis and Bubbly Uncles. You probably know some of these nicknames without even realizing it—Nimarata “Nikki” Haley has been going by a family nickname for most of her public life.
We’ve all known folks whose name is very hard to pronounce in English who adopt one-syllable names for ease: “My name is Yeong-Hwan but you can call me Sam.” Indeed, my kids have teachers with relatively easy last names who go by “Mr. S” or “Miss K” for simplicity.
This is a time-honored tradition among brown folks, but it also leads to some confusion later in life. Sometimes you find out that the cousin you were raised with actually has an entirely different, utterly unpronounceable name. There you are, trying to ask your mom about “Pippoo” or whatever, and your mother replies with “Who? Oh, Veerangana,” and you have to spend the next day mentally reformatting your family tree while trying to figure out how many A’s are in “Veerangana.”
Which, presumably, is why Nikki Haley still goes by Nikki. It’s just easier. And, indeed, she may well not think of herself as Nimarata.
Anyway, that’s a long setup for the crux:
Who knows if presidential candidate (and fellow South Asian) Kamala Harris was raised the same way I was, with everyone having a stupider, faker name than their real one. In the public consciousness, at least, Harris has had plenty of names: Laffin’ Kamala, Veep, Brat, Momala (my personal favorite), and, maybe eventually, Madam President. But through it all is one clear constant, already a thorn in the sides of a lot of brown people across the world: Even when you think you’re saying Harris’ first name right, you’re still saying it wrong. And she’s letting us!
For once, I don’t blame white people for this. In 2016, while she was running for the Senate, Harris released a PSA to help people learn how to say her name. “It’s not Cam-el-uh. It’s not Kuh-ma-la. It’s not Karmela,” say a rotation of cutie-pie kids. “It’s Kamala.” For years, Harris has been telling people her name is pronounced “comma-la, like the punctuation mark.” It’s common, for people with unique ethnic names, to find ways to explain the pronunciation approachably and easily. I’ve been doing this for years, so much so that in my mid-20s, I realized I had been saying my own name wrong for most of my life. Sometimes it’s just easier to agree with the pronunciation that most people can get their heads around. It’s tiring to spend your life explaining your most basic self; Harris first had to get people to even recognize the basics of her name.
Indeed, until well into her failed run for the 2020 nomination, I had always mentally pronounced her name “kuh-MA-la.” I had seldom heard it pronounced and that’s what I intuited from reading it. And, for some reason, I had the impression for a while after that this it was actually pronounced “CAM-el-uh.” I only recently shifted to “COMMA-luh.”
And now I’m supposed to change again?!
Apparently:
And yet her pronunciation still rings false for anyone raised with South Asian family members. It’s not “comma-la.” It never was! Kamala, among Indians, is a pretty common name for girls. It means “lotus” and is often used with some interchangeability for Lakshmi, one of the chief goddesses in Hinduism. But it’s never pronounced “comma-la”; instead, it’s more subtle, closer to “com’la.” The emphasis isn’t on the first part, “comma”; instead, there isn’t any real emphasis at all. It’s smooth sailing, across her full name. It can be tough for tongues trained in English, but you almost have to skip gently over that second a—not entirely, but just enough so that it doesn’t sound as if you’re speaking in punctuation.
Appropriate emphasis in South Asian names continues to be tough for North American audiences. Usha Vance is lucky her first name is so simple; her son Vivek will continue to have his name mildly butchered while his dad rails against women who own cats. (What did we ever do to you?) But again, who can blame everyone for getting it wrong when the candidate herself isn’t quite getting it either? If I’m being fully honest with myself, even my own explanation is lacking: Hindi doesn’t use Western pronunciations of the letters a and o, meaning they sometimes operate either more as a u sound (as in pagal) or as an au sound (as in chodah). In this case, we’d be better off pronouncing her name more like “Cum’la,” but I know better than to suggest that spelling. I too was once 12 years old.
Honestly, “COM-luh” doesn’t strike me as particularly challenging. Neither does “CUM-luh,” for that matter, aside from misogynistic jokes it would invite.
To the extent one of those variants doesn’t exactly replicate the way the name would be pronounced by a native speaker, however, that should surely be forgiven. As I noted fifteen years ago, when Sonia Sotomayor was nominated to the Supreme Court, pronouncing ‘foreign’ names should come with mutual respect. We should absolutely strive to pronounce them correctly but native speakers should also understand that those raised in a different language are only going to come so close.
My first name everyone knows how to pronounce, but is constantly misspelled. My last name is never pronounced or spelled correctly.
Le sigh.
Altering a name to make it work better for Anglophones is common. We were originally called Drumpf but changed it.
As the old saying goes: Call me anything, except late for dinner.
I think the hard part would be the second “a”.
I would also argue that I would be a little surprised if the name is pronounced identically throughout India. But maybe I am wrong.
My first Indian ex-partner has a name that should be easy. But I never thought I truly pronounced like she and her Mom did. And it was a slight difference in the “a” pronunciation. Further complicating matters for her: she also looked nearly identical to a famous fictional character known the world over who has a similar name. So people often mistook her name for the character’s during introductions.
My (second) Indian-American ex-partner tells her patients to call her Dr. T because her last name is super long. I think it was pronounced roughly phonetically, but maybe not. She said I pronounced it correctly. However, that leads to . . .
Perhaps Kamala wanted her name pronounced that way, even if it wasn’t for anyone else.
The name I just can’t get right ever is Mayor Pete’s last name. My last name is mispronounced by everyone, too. It’s German.
@Laura Koerber:
Kur-bur?
@Laura Koerber:
It’s the same problem as with Harris: He himself has given contradictory explanations as to how to pronounce it.
“Kerber” is easy enough in English. But the true umlaut sound is a challenge. And Germans likely pronounce it closer to “Karebarr” than “Kerber.”
@Grumpy realist:
You must get tired of telling folks, Grumpy…Grum..py, two syllables,but really no emphasis on any letter, just like the dwarf, I kid, I kid, forgive me for my lame but I suspect still slightly funny attempt at being funny.
Being serious, my mother’s first name is not easy to pronounce or spell, and her Mom’s name was not the easiest either. My grandmother’s formal first name was shortened to Rene by most folks including us, her family, but unless I needed to type out her full name on a document, as far as I am concerned her first name was always Grandma.
My mom’s name was modified to Henrietta by our neighbor, even though her name is actually 10 letters and mine is longer by 1 letter, my actual name is much more common around the world than hers.
You know what I have to say has made me smile the past 2 days, how easy it was for everyone to accept the news that Kamala is now a candidate to be the next President of the United States. Something about the ease of accepting this news has me thinking that Trump really should be worried.
Less people are clutching their pearls that a woman dares run again to be the President, and a woman of color no less, seriously, way less pearl clutching from both the Democrats and GOP than I would have expected. Americans seem ready to roll with the news and accept a change in the Democratic candidate for President of the U.S., again, if I were Trump this would stress me out.
Vance needs to sit him down and say that sir, while you are whining like a child about being reimbursed for all your expenses campaigning against Biden, and saying I will debate her but only on Fox because I can call her poopypants on a national stage and Fox News will let me get away with it, she and the White House are making plans to grind us up into a meat patty to be mildly seasoned and grilled up on the Labor Day weekend. There is no super secret internal GOP only poll that shows that it will be a cakewalk which would allow for you can be your same childish self from now until the election, it will be a real fight to win, and he needs to start accepting that.
Maybe kind-of like the five stages of grief Trump will finally get to the point (maybe today, maybe a bit further out from today) where he understands and buckles up and preps for someone who may understand that what you bring to a gun fight…is your own gun.
Harris is so easy for so many people to pronounce.
Some thing just popped into my head.
Has anyone responded to “Democrat Party” with “the Gop”, near-rhyme with Gob (pronounced like the Biblical boils dude, mispronounced as hard-g gob)?
I’m inclined to call BS on this article. We should pronounce her name as she requests as best we can.
I have a difficult to pronounce and spell last name from a European language. Further, the name is “misspelled” per the historical spelling of it and general spelling rules for that language. But.. that’s how we spell it so our spelling of our name is right. Further, we pronounce it differently than native speakers of the language would pronounce it and, in fact, how another branch of the family pronounces it (which is closer to the “authentic” spelling). Someone a couple generations ago “American-ized” it or something.
So here we are with a supposedly misspelled and mispronounced name. And yet… neither of those is true. Native speakers of the language will tell me I’m spelling and pronouncing my own name wrong. Nope. Not at all.
If she says Comma-lah is correct for her, than that is correct for her. I understand the author’s intent but telling her SHE is wrong about her own name is beyond presumptuous.
@Kazzy: quite, it is her name, the way she says it then becomes the right way.
@Laura Koerber: I find Buttigieg’s name quite amusing, as Maltese is effective Maghrebine arabic dialect, and it is quite easy for us – once I found out the family is Maltese origin (and quite funny in meaning to me).
Merriam-Webster believes this is wrong.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/kamala
But what is a vermifuge?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vermifuge
Kamala does not mean “lotus,” it means “destroyer of tapeworms.” Recent clarification and reiteration of this site’s policy against juvenile nicknames and insults towards former President Donald J. Trump prevent me from identifying the particular parasitic worm, but it is Kamala’s destiny to defeat him. It’s right there, in her name.
“How Dare You?” this name pronunciation thing is on theme
Having been at various times Mike, Mikey, Michael, Michel, Alex, Frank, Carter and David as well as using the pseudonyms Katherine and K.A. and C. and A.R. and Beth and L.E. and Pat and Francine, and probably some I’m forgetting, I’ve never understood why people get worked up over how their name is pronounced. A rose by any other name, as Shakespeare said. Or, as I say, “as long as I can cash the check.”
@Kurtz: As a person called names in school for years, I feel compelled to note that calling the GoP “the gop” (rhymes with mop) will only matter to the extent that the name troubles them. There’s something to be gained by taking Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice about not being able to be demeaned except as your reaction empowers the demeaning.
I really hated that article. Why does the author get to decide how she pronounces her own name. I’d be pissed if someone came at me with that garbage. I know this because they did constantly. I formerly had a one letter first name. If I wasn’t getting tortured over it; it was getting misspelled. A one letter name, constantly misspelled. Filled me with rage every time.
People’s names are what they say they are, how they say they are. I get pissed when people try to mess with Nikki Haley over her name and I can’t stand Nikki Haley.
@Beth: Yeah, I personally avoid something slightly different – the distorted name moniker. Because I had so much of it to deal with when I was young. I never engaged in mocking John Boehner over his last name, etc, etc.
And a joke that has been beaten to death is not really funny, even if it once was. And to me, they never were.
Yeah, demeaning and belittling your opponent is a long-time component of politics. For instance, consider Versailles and the Court of Louis XIV. Highly successful governance, that was…
More people need to have watched Ms Marvel. It’s not too late!
My mother, a long time elementary school teacher who had to remember a new list of names each year, named us Bruce and Paul, largely because except for adding y, there are no common nicknames or variants.
Yesterday I saw a picture of a button that just reds ” , la”. Also, someone took Kamala means lotus in Hindi and added that in English it means POTUS.
@Kurtz:
That’s interesting… Last year I started going to a doctor whom the office people refer to as Dr. T because she has a longish (four-syllable), less familiar Indian name. She doesn’t seem to mind that I address her using her full last name. Hopefully I’m not butchering the pronunciation.
@Eusebio: Teacher 25 years with a 4-syllable last name compounded by the county clerk misspelling said last name on my grandfather’s citizenship papers. I always went by “Mr. P” (except in Korea where foreign teachers are “Professor [first name]” or “[first name] Teacher” in lower grades) but have always found students attempting to use my whole name a charming trait for a student to have, even when they fail at pronunciation. I suspect the same is true for your doctor.
Her name is not difficult to pronounce. I fear our culture may be too stupid to survive.
@JKB:
It is on theme, the theme being grownups should treat each other with respect and simple courtesy – you know, things like addressing people as they wish to be addressed.
If you are someone who’s emotional growth stopped in the 8th grade, I’m sure such things don’t make sense to you. Yeah JKB, I’m talking to you.
I have an unusual last name. When I was a little boy, I heard endless variations of it directed at me, and got in more than a few fights over them. By the time I was 14, I was bigger than most of my classmates an lo and behold, that crap pretty much stopped, as name callers and wise asses always seem to want to punch down. A year later one of my friends actually came up with a play on my name that was pretty cool, and that stuck with me through high school.
@anjin-san:
Wait… are you telling me that this rule applies to everyone not just those who are our betters?
Whoa, dude! Mind blown!
I named my daughter Taliesin, pronounced Tal-yah-sin, but she pronounces it Tal-eh-sin. It used to drive me crazy, but damn….it’s her name. She can decide how she wants it pronounced. It doesn’t hurt me at all, I can pronounce it just fine in my head.
The funny part is when people tell her “What a pretty name!”, and in my head there’s a whole-ass story about why she has that name, and not all of it is pretty, PARTICULARLY the way SHE pronounces it, but….
ok, rant over. Thanks for the compliment on the name I gave my baby. 🙂
I’m a teacher and for part of my career worked in a school where we used last names (everywhere else I taught we used first names). I was told this was necessary because “respect.” The funny thing was… many of those same people demanding “respect” from the kids by the use of last names were quick to question why I worked with my kids on pronouncing my last name rather than just going by Mr. K. “Well, I think it is good to teach them that they should always make an honest effort to pronounce someone’s name correctly and that they can’t just abbreviate someone else’s names because it is unfamiliar or difficult to pronounce. Ya know… respect.”
Funny thing is my name isn’t all that hard to pronounce if you just hear it and repeat it. So the kids were pretty good. The adults on the other hand… god, they were terrible! Despite hearing the kids say it correctly and other teachers who took the time to learn it say it correctly, so many were just butchering it left and right.
But, hey, it was a respect thing, right?!
If a teacher wants to go by Mr. or Mrs. First Initial, by all means, they ought to. But let’s stop the practice and telling people, “I’ll just call you something OTHER than your name because your name is hard for me.” That is their decision to make and theirs alone.
@Kurtz:
Yeah, the ‘Democrat Party’ thing.
About 4 years ago in 2020 when Trump was running for re-election, one of my sisters referred to the ‘Democrat Party’ in a discussion, as in ‘the Democrat Party never gave Trump a chance.’ I interrupted the conversation with a ‘there is no Democrat Party.’ Her response, ‘whatever, you know what I mean.’ My response, ‘No, no I don’t. There is no Democrat Party.’
That ended our ‘discussion.’ Family.
@al Ameda:
Yeah, the “Democrat Party” is kind of like Yacht Rock. It only exists in some peoples imagination.