How do I pronounce "Kamala"?
How do I pronounce "Kamala"?
Is it “Camel-uh” or “Cam-ahl-uh”?
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119 comments
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Comma-la (as she tells us to pronounce it), or even Com'la (as it is traditionally pronounced)
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Thank you for this. I’ve heard her name mispronounced so often that I genuinely thought kah-MALL-uh was correct. Whoops! Comma-la it is!
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Happy to help!
Oh, I shoulda linked to a first-hand source where she herself wrote "comma-la" as the pronunciation (no particular accent on syllables). It is in her book, and also towards the bottom of this piece has that excerpts from her book: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/book-excerpt-kamala-harris-truths-hold/story?id=60234101
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kah-MALL-uh
The right mispronounces it that way intentionally.
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As I’ve heard. Now we know better than to perpetuate it!
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Commala? As in the pokemon Komala?
So it really is Komala Harris vs Trumpshoos
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Isn't the Pokemon's name pronounced like coma + koala? Coma and comma are different.
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🤷I've been pronouncing it as Ko-Ma-La without the emphasise of ow. I appreciate this post though, i've seen so many asian name being butchered by english speaking country it become annoying.
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Ko-Ma-La without the emphasise of ow.
I'm not sure I follow. Coma would probably be "ko-ma", like I'd suggested, whereas comma is something like "cah-ma"...but I'm not sure where the "ow" comes in
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"Comma-la" unfortunately doesn't help much for people without US accents lol (though of course people in the US are who the question and answer are most relevant to). On first reading -- without the accent or something close to it -- it implies "kom-uh-luh", whereas with the accent it implies something more like "kah-muh-luh", just based on how people pronounce "comma" differently.
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It's funny because the way you spelt it sounds like the first "don't" of the video you linked. Americans in general seem to make a point of pronouncing things their way rather than how they should be. I don't think it's racism as much as it is laziness.
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their way rather than how they should be.
Every language has different sounds. It has long been understood that languages will translate words/names into versions they can actually hear and pronounce. Sadly, some people mock or demean people who try to speak a non-native language and make errors in it. In the U.S. it used to be fairly common to mock Asians coming from a language with only one liquid consonant sound for their inability to differentiate between 'r' and 'l' sounds.
I know I can't hear the difference in various Russian language vowels and while I can hear tones, I don't know how I'd explain their pronunciation in an Anglicized name -- or if it would be relevant.
While I appreciate that regional accents mean that non-U.S. citizens might not say "comma" the way it is heard in the U.S., I do expect that if a U.S. citizen tells me to pronounce their own name in a U.S. manner, then that is how it "should be" pronounced.
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sorry are you saying people should pronounce their own names in ways they don't prefer to be "correct"? Also etc etc language guides are descriptive not prescriptive.
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119 comments