Since Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Donald Trump has been invoking her name a lot. Well, something close to her name. Harris pronounces it “KA-ma-la.” Trump, however, has often been pronouncing it “Ka-MA-la” or even “KUH-ma-la.” He did it again yesterday at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. He insists he doesn’t care one way or another (though after audience members voiced their disapproval, he shifted his emphasis to the first syllable). “Some people think I mispronounce it on purpose,” he has said, “but actually, I’ve heard it said about seven different ways.”
The name is originally Sanskrit. To many who don’t speak that language, it can at first seem counterintuitive to pronounce it “KA-ma-la.” It certainly took me a bit of practice to get into the habit. American English speakers might expect it to be “Ka-MA-la” because in so many other words ending in “-ala,” the accent is on the penultimate syllable: koala, impala, veal Marsala, even Guatemala.
But while so many of us have learned from our mistakes, Trump has defiantly not, and his acolytes have joined right in. The fact that the name is pronounced in different ways — though I’d challenge Trump to come up with seven — hardly means that none is correct. Claiming otherwise, or insisting that the vice president’s name can be pronounced in any which way, is a form of ridicule, a way to attribute to the candidate a dismissible and even peculiar blurriness. It’s a way of subjecting his opponent to the insult comedy we have come to expect.
Yet “Ka-MA-la” is doing something more specific. Trump’s pronunciation is reanimating an approach to foreign-sounding words that predominated in the first half of the 20th century, when America was a less multicultural nation and American English was a less multicultural language. It’s an antique from a more normative time.
Consider the name of the 50th state, which entered the union in 1959. The word “Hawaii” is unlike other English words. It entered mainstream American parlance with “eye-ee,” a sound that rhymes with no other word in the language. Decades ago, many mainlanders pronounced it “Ha-WHY-a” instead. That sat more intuitively on Anglophone tongues accustomed to words ending in “eye-ah,” like Jeremiah and messiah.
In Hawaii itself, according to a local account in 1918, Mark Twain’s relative Mildred Clemens created some offense during a lecture because local residents “greatly deplored her persistent pronunciation of Honolulu as ‘Honolula.’” She was not unique; in 1912, the Successful Poultry Journal reported one Mr. Martin shipping some birds to “Honolula, Hawaii.” Americans also once often pronounced ravioli as “raviola” — rhymes with Victrola and cola. But by 1950 the “raviola” pronunciation was plummeting, with “ravioli” ever ascendant thereafter. In the 1941 film “Moon Over Miami,” a woman flirts with a man by giving him a jar of what she calls her “guacamala sauce,” a pronunciation further from its Spanish origin than what is common today.
If after World War II Americans became more inclined to give foreign words the college try, one reason was because more of us went to college, thanks to the G.I. Bill. In 1940, four years before the G.I. Bill was introduced, only about one in four Americans even had high school diplomas; by 1980, almost one in five Americans over 25 had bachelor’s degrees, many of which would have required exposure to foreign languages. After the war, international travel became easier and cheaper. After the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, America’s population became diverse to an extent unknown since before the 1920s. The culinary revolution of the 1990s has also exposed us to new words, and the cultures associated with them, in an ongoing way unknown to 1950s Americans for whom “pizza pie” was an exotic treat. And the globalization of popular culture has done a great deal to bring all of us into contact with languages other than our own.
Exposure alone is just a start, and Americans are far from mastering the pronunciation of all words from outside the English language or our family’s own heritage. To say “karaoke” even close to how it sounds in Japanese would mean wangling “kah-rah-OH-kay,” so unfamiliar to the Anglo mouth that “carry-oaky” qualifies as a decent approximation. But generally, we try harder than in the old days.
The Trumpian attitude toward Harris’s Indian name reanimates an old American trope. Instead of opening up to a foreign word and even exploring it a little, Trump is treating it as an alien presence in need of assimilation, telling it to conform to whatever he decides it should be.
This willfully blasé attitude toward the word’s pronunciation has the effect of othering it, and Harris by extension. A name with no set pronunciation is alien, exotic, unplaceable — and therefore not who we are. It’s a subtle dig that aims in the same direction as Trump’s false rumor that Barack Obama wasn’t American.
I find it all to be very Chef Boyardee. When that brand name was created in 1928, the phonetic spelling was a way of spoon-feeding Americans the last name of the product’s inventor, Boiardi. And still, the best we could do was say it with the accent on the last syllable instead of the middle one, which is why we still say “boy-ar-DEE.” But today there would be less reason to worry that Americans would choke on the name Boiardi. Legions would easily say it with the accent on the middle syllable, just as we properly manage Versace, De Cecco and Boboli. While the rest of us have moved on to tortellini and cavatappi, in calling Harris “Ka-MA-la,” Trump is still eating decades-old canned food.
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