Spelling Malayalam

01 Aug 2020

Today afternoon, while I was browsing through the website of the Department of Pre-university Education, Karnataka for text books available for the pre-university classes,  something on the site caught my attention. Malayalam, my mother tongue, was listed as a language taught for the first year pre-university classes. There was also a text book — ‘Malayala Manjari’ — listed on the site as one of the books in the syllabus. What was more interesting was how Malayalam was spelled on both — the webpage and the title page of the book.

Pue kar webpage 01aug202o

Malayala Manjari _ title page - 01 aug 2020

The spelling on the web site was “Malaylam” (missing an ‘a’) and the spelling on the book title was ‘Malayalayam’ (an extra ‘y’ and an extra ‘a’).

We all make typos. So the idea of this post is not to point out the mistake or to ridicule — but to give a tip on how to avoid this mistake. “MALAYALAM’ — the word when spelled in English — is a Palindrome. So after you type the word, try to read it both ways.

A palindrome is “a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backwards as forwards, e.g. madam or nurses run”. “The word palindrome is derived from the Greek ‘palin,’ or “back” and ‘dromos’ or “direction.” The actual Greek phrase alluded to the backward movement of the crab”. — Read more on Palindromes on Example.com.

The funny part is, there are several instances of this mistake on several websites — even on Amazon titles. See the following example:

malayalam spell on Amazon

Leave your thought