Month: February 2012

“The simple is the seal of true.

And beauty is the splendor of truth.

With the words above, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, popularly known as Chandra, concluded his Nobel Prize lecture on 8 December 1983. Toward the end of his talk, he was describing black holes in the astronomical universe, explaining the simplicity in the underlying physics and the beauty of their mathematical description within the framework of Einstein’s theory of relativity. ‘They are,’ he said, ‘the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe.’ […]For newspaper journalists and broadcast interviewers, neither the simplicity of the physics of the black holes nor the mathematical beauty of their description was of major concern; the pronunciation of Chandra’s full name seemed to present them with an astronomical difficulty in and of itself.”

This is the introduction of a very good article about Chandrasekhar, which appeared in the December 2010 issue of Physics Today. Although the last statement of the above paragraph is admittedly funny, as a linguist I couldn’t help but find it sad at the same time, because it is true. “Chandra” is a name very familiar to physicists and engineers; in college we learn about the “Chandra X-ray Observatory”, the “Chandra telescope”. I don’t know how Chandrasekhar felt about this but if it were me I don’t think I’d be very happy about people butchering my name. Especially when it comes to someone that contributed so much to science, I think one should make an effort to say and write the full name: Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. If nothing else, out of respect. I understand that for translators, who are more exposed to foreign names and complex sounds, names such as Chandrasekhar’s may be nothing extraordinary, but even to the untrained ear the pronunciation difficulty should not be “astronomical”!

  

The author goes on to say: “Being the first son, Chandra inherited the name of his grandfather, Ramanathan Chandrasekhar (referred to as R.C. hereafter)”. R.C., like …J.Lo. And further down he writes: “From his high-school days, […] Chandra had determined to pursue a career in pure science. He had as an example his uncle Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (popularly known as C.V. Raman) […]”. C.V. Raman; doesn’t it sound like M.C. Hammer to you? It does to me.

  

“In February and March [of 1928], Raman, along with Kariamanickam Srinivasa Krishnan, made a fundamental discovery in the molecular scattering of light, later to become known as the Raman effect.” I know about the Raman effect but I never knew Raman’s full name, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in my textbooks. It was always Raman, could have been any Raman, as in “Raman noodles” (my college roommate’s dinner every single night for four years). This, of course, is fine, it’s his last name, not a chopped version or …an acronym.

I don’t know if I’m too sensitive to “name-chopping”, if I should lighten up, if my lack of sympathy towards name-choppers is because when you grow up listening to names like Hatzigiannakopoulos, Papageorgianopoulos, Hatzipanagiotidis, and Papanikolaou, then a 5-syllable name doesn’t exactly present a challenge.

  

And maybe Indian people don’t care much anyway. Or maybe they do care but are very considerate of those who don’t make an effort to learn or pronounce their full name. Well, instead of speculating, I thought I’d ask one. I asked an old colleague of mine, a programmer, whose name is Vidyasagar Bhakthavatsalam. At work everyone used to call him VB. That’s how he was introduced to me. Sometimes I was confused and thought we were talking about VB as in Visual Basic. A couple of people would call him “Vidya”. VB (my colleague, not the programming language) didn’t seem to mind, I thought that perhaps he even found it amusing. I used to call him VB too, not only because that’s how he was introduced to me but because I didn’t want to stand out as a know-it-all. But I always felt bad when I called him VB. So after not having spoken to him in a while, I e-mailed him out of the blue to ask if it bothered him that I used to butcher his name a few years ago. And if yes, I wanted to apologize (better late than never, I suppose). He sent me a very nice answer, that if one had to shorten his name, he preferred “Vidya” but that “VB works as well”. Which I interpreted to mean that if you call him VB he’ll still answer, but the more you chop off the worse. Then he went on to give me the etymology of his name, which I found beautiful. He said that in Sanskrit, Vidya means knowledge, and Sagar means ocean. So the full name means “ocean of knowledge”. Let me say that these two words are amongst my favorite, both in terms of phonetics and in terms of what they represent. Phonetically I find ocean, océan, ωκεανός, océano, very pleasing to the ear. Same goes for the Greek θάλασσα(sea). The ocean, the sea, is one of the things I miss most about my home country, two of my favorite Greek songs have the word θάλασσα/sea in the title, blue is my favorite color in all of its shades and always has been, and the thought of the ocean evokes to me the notions of openness, adventure, hope, vastness, possibilities, peace. And knowledge… suffice it to say that one of the main reasons I am a translator is because with every text we translate we learn something new. Knowledge to me is like the fountain of youth, a stimulus that keeps me going.  So these two things, ocean and knowledge, combined in a single word, in a single first name, is something I find absolutely beautiful. So my dear friend Vidyasagar, my sincere apologies. The word does represent you indeed, and I apologize for having butchered it for so long.