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(If this belongs elsewhere, point me there; I didn't see an appropriate language stack, and it is in a fantasy story.)

I have been working up Chapter 2 of Tanith Lee's collection Tamastara, Or The Indian Nights as a performance piece (11 typed pages, about an hour).

But the first-person character is supposed to have spent time in India and speak Hindi fairly well, which means I want to get the pronunciation right for the occasional Hindi word or phrase in this text. This is complicated, of course, by changes in transliteration since she wrote the story; websearching and Hindi pronunciation pages aren't finding some of the spellings she used:

  1. A place in Calcutta: "the Jadu Ghar". Resolved: The Indian Museum in Kolkata, informally known to locals as the "magic house"
  2. A city (large enough to have a hospital): Chadhur. Maybe: Websearch found someone saying they were a "college student in chadhur Bazar amravati", and websearch for that finds Chandhur Bazar Amravati, which these days has multiple hospitals, one of which is a government hospital. Wikipedia lists three other Chandhurs in various Indian states. Unless someone has a better suggestion, I'm going to go with Chadhur==Chandhur.

If anyone can clarify these references so I can find IPA or other pronunciation guidance, I'd appreciate it.

Usages, in case they help:

"My mind was still idling somewhere between the Victoria Memorial and the Jadu Ghar."

"... I ended up more or less randomly in Chadhur. [...] I went over to the hospital building..."

keshlam
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  • The next step will have to be to improve my ability to fake an Indian accent. I can get close enough for my own ear, but I'm sure I can do better... I stumbled across this tale a decade or two ago and immediately decided I needed to be able to perform it, off-book. Had to change one or two words to allow for the change from written to spoken, but other than that I had it word-for-word. Need to refresh a bit now. Before anyone is too impressed: It's really not much harder than learning a bunch of songs well enough to perform them. Just time and practice and learning the author's rhythms. – keshlam Feb 04 '22 at 02:10

1 Answers1

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According to Google Translate, the first one is:

जादू घर

And the second one is either:

चधुर

or

चाधुर

You can use the speaker button on Google Translate to hear the sounds. GT

Righter
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  • Many thanks. I'd been trying that, but I had no idea whether the spellings were at all close, or even if the words were correct (though I assumed Ms. Lee did do her research before releasing the story), and the translations I was coming up with seemed to be questionable -- though it isn't uncommon for names of people or things to have alternative meanings. I also wasn't certain that the terms were indeed Hindi. ("I am but an egg.") So I was missing the obvious, and needed the cross-check. – keshlam Feb 03 '22 at 20:48
  • Hm. The second one seems to translate roughly as either "clever" or "past". I could see a city name deriving from either, but I'm having trouble finding confirmation in mapping tools. Google finds Chowdhury as sounding like both, but that seems to be a region rather than a city. Which is not impossible given the phrasing of the story, but which doesn't seem to match the usages. – keshlam Feb 03 '22 at 21:07
  • Added usages from the story, in case they help. Note that whether we can get this nailed down or not, Righter's answer should at least get my pronunciation closer; the difference between the two proposed is whether the accent is on the right syllable, and that's something a non-native speaker will often get wrong. – keshlam Feb 03 '22 at 21:14