/kəmələ/ is how it is said. Those weird gyphs are IPA symbols, not sure if they’re part of any European languages that uses Latin as their alphabet.
The issue with English is that it is a non-phonetic language. In English, ‘a’ can sound either like æ, eɪ, ɑː, ɔː, etc (refer IPA). The specific ‘a’ sound in Kamala has a name, by the way - it is called schwa (ə).
I’m pretty sure a French or a German wouldn’t butcher this name, as their alphabets are pretty consistent in phonetic pronunciation - they just map fine with Indian languages, like take for example, Hindi - ‘a’ -> अ, ‘i’ -> इ, ‘e’ -> ए, ‘o’ -> ओ, etc.
In Devanagari, it is written as कमला (ka + ma + laa), which is the feminine form of कमल (ka + ma + la). In Hindi, every varnmala by default has a short ‘a’ - adding a ा turns this into a longer ‘aa’ sound (क् + अ -> क (ka), क् + आ -> का (kaa)).
Yes, I know that Kamala is probably half-Dravidian (Tamil, or Telugu, I think), but it really doesn’t matter a lot - sure, there’s some differences between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, one of which being the schwa deletion, but apart from that, most letters are almost similar in function.
/kəmələ/ is how it is said. Those weird gyphs are IPA symbols, not sure if they’re part of any European languages that uses Latin as their alphabet.
The issue with English is that it is a non-phonetic language. In English, ‘a’ can sound either like æ, eɪ, ɑː, ɔː, etc (refer IPA). The specific ‘a’ sound in Kamala has a name, by the way - it is called schwa (ə).
I’m pretty sure a French or a German wouldn’t butcher this name, as their alphabets are pretty consistent in phonetic pronunciation - they just map fine with Indian languages, like take for example, Hindi - ‘a’ -> अ, ‘i’ -> इ, ‘e’ -> ए, ‘o’ -> ओ, etc.
In Devanagari, it is written as कमला (ka + ma + laa), which is the feminine form of कमल (ka + ma + la). In Hindi, every varnmala by default has a short ‘a’ - adding a ा turns this into a longer ‘aa’ sound (क् + अ -> क (ka), क् + आ -> का (kaa)).
Yes, I know that Kamala is probably half-Dravidian (Tamil, or Telugu, I think), but it really doesn’t matter a lot - sure, there’s some differences between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, one of which being the schwa deletion, but apart from that, most letters are almost similar in function.
It’s 'cause we took the letters from Latin, which actually had 5 vowels, and applied it to a Germanic language which, in my dialect, has 17.
We also standardised the spelling in patches hundreds of years ago, and never updated it, but that’s a sort of separate issue.