Different styles in writing and pronouncing of Punjabi words
Punjabi words have strange pronunciation and spellings
Punjabi is a very open language. It gives the option to use various words that are imported from different languages around the world. A lot of people believe that the origin of Punjabi language is Prakrit, but experts have shared their findings that it is Sanskrit that’s the root of Punjabi.
When you pronounce many words and names in Punjabi, you will notice that you are justifying some of the very fundamental and often-ignored rules of pronunciation of Sanskrit alphabet itself.
But anyways, our present discussion is about Punjabi words and how they are pronounced but written differently and sometimes does not have a spelling.
Consider for that matter the word ਚਾਹੁੰਦਾ…
While speaking Punjabi, people will say ਚਾਹੁਣਾ, ਚਾਹੁਣੈ.
However, these kinds of differences arise in number of languages, and there is not too much trouble in this. The real problem lies in the popularity of ambiguity of spellings.
Conversational Punjabi is very much different from what the written Punjabi is. This is the reason a lot of people can’t write Punjabi script properly–they will have innumerable spelling mistakes. You will see almost zero standardization in the spellings which has led to confusion as to which spelling is right.
In my opinion, there should be a proper spelling standardization of spellings and it should propagated through the government organizations and offices. Otherwise, Punjabi language will lose its original flavor, as it seems to be doing now.
I thoroughly enjoyed this short read.I just wanted to say, for someone learning Punjabi and starting off with learning Gurmukhi for correct spelling and to help with pronunciation then going to talk and chat online with people in punjabi to practice made learning 100x harder, the lack of standard spelling is astonishing and highly confusing.