We have all heard this line, made famous by a certain Bollywood star 🙂 And he gave a series of brilliant example as to why is it…

Getting to the point of this blog, most of us must have seen and had a hearty laugh at the signages with wrongly spelled english. I too have had many laughs. Child Beer! But a recent one really got me thinking. Are these ‘misspelt’ words funny or actually brilliant. Think about it. Phonetically they are perfect. And mind you, ‘English’ is not our native language. It was thrust upon us by the British. It’s a different matter all together that today, we Indians, probably have the largest population speaking the Queen’s english.

But getting back to these signages. Think about those for a while. Most of them are done by small businesses, mostly in rural india, trying to target the people who might not know the local script. The guy writing the signages, probably has limited knowledge of english which is not his native language. Should we not admire the ingenuity of the guy who, armed with just 26 alphabets, spelling the words purely on how they sound, not knowing the intricacies of the language. Isn’t that amazing. Isn’t that how a language should be. Most Indian languages are! We write it as it sounds. Why did English as a language introduce so many exceptions! Shouldn’t we ridicule these exceptions rather than the person who makes an attempt to guess spellings on pure phonetics…

I wonder what the Spelling Bees make of this issue