[Cricket, with the Lord of Byron]
No rest for the wickets
Not mentioning Shane Warne this time was briefly considered, but it can’t be done. He is just too important and wonderful. Drawing deeply on his considerable prowess, he has worked tirelessly and brilliantly for Australia in recent months and his Test wicket tally in just over fourteen years is now a boggling 685. After such exertion, most younger men would opt for a long lie in, but Warne simply boards a plane and starts a new season captaining Hampshire.
 |
Within the twinkling of an eye he’s gracing the headlines for all the right reasons. At Hants he puts his team in the lead against Middlesex, allegedly drives up to London with two bottles of quality champagne and some vodka, is snapped cavorting charmingly with two models, then drives back next morning and takes seven wickets to win the match. His private life may be his own, but I’m sure that I speak for multitudes when I say that my life is enhanced by the knowledge that somewhere in England, as victims of the War on Happiness mount, Warney, as champion is winning another battle for them. |
Quite reasonably, everybody wants a piece of the action. I’ve been composing text messages purporting to be from the good Lady of Byron, promising the great man all sorts of stimulating experiences should he find himself in these parts. I’m sure she won’t mind, though I gather that he may have to lose that underwear.
It is chastening to think that one day we will have no more Shane Warne. Shocking but true. We can only hope that he really does carry on into his forties.
In contrast, lesser English spinners have been having groin trouble in those parts. Ashley Giles has a Gilmour groin and ponders: “which came first - the groin or the hip?” And Min Patel laments: "groins, I'm told, are notoriously bad for never going away. It disappears for months on end and reappears out of nowhere." Groin straps may be unfashionable, but perhaps it is time they were seriously considered.
Murali controversy
Now on to lighter matters. Since so many spend countless hours discussing this topic in the pubs, urinals and bus shelters of the world, it is time to address one of the major cricketing issues of the age. I am of course referring to the great Murali controversy.
 |
I’d better declare an interest here and state that I am an unabashed Muralidaran man. This is despite the fact that Muralitharan is still the most commonly used spelling of the great man’s name, even on the venerable Cricinfo website. I accept that the original Tamil has no perfect English equivalent, but then again, not all transliterations are equal. To set aside linguistic argument for the moment, it should be stated that Murali himself prefers this version. He has said so. He even wears it on his shirt. That’s almost good enough for me, but it is also interesting to see why this might be so. |
Now I must be frank. Nobody would call me a phonetician. Even in an emergency. I’m even having trouble grappling with structuralism and at times I struggle with English. Still, a little dilettante dabbling sounds sound. After all, wild speculation does have a noble tradition in sports writing and pork bellies. So, in the tradition of Socratic dialogue, I will dabble, enthusiastically anticipating having my more risible and egregious errors politely corrected by bemused speakers of Tamil.
Trifling
While a great deal of information on the subject of the Tamil language is available to the casual reader, my idle fossicking was unable to unearth even a trifling monograph solely devoted to the transliteration of Murali’s name into English.
So, brace yourself, here we go. As every schoolchild knows, Murali is of Tamil stock. They will also be aware that the Tamil language belongs to the Dravidian language family and was originally quite independent of Sanskrit or other ancient languages, so is classified as a classical language. It is, according to some, the oldest continuous, living language in the world and its earliest known inscriptions date from 300 BCE. The alphabet was originally written on palm leaves and the letters are made up mainly of curved strokes to minimise leaf ripping. Some English words taken from Tamil include curry (vegetables) and pariah (drummer). |
 |
The language is written with a syllabic alphabet in which all consonants have an inherent vowel. Diacritics, which can appear above, below, before or after the consonant, indicate a change to another vowel or the suppression of the inherent vowel. It should also be noted that in Tamil, the way a letter is pronounced can depend upon where in the word it appears.
Immediately we see some of the complexities we are dealing with. In an ideal world, one would indulge in deep linguistic analysis then examine each phoneme of Murali’s name in bloody-minded detail, but as a service to readers, we will gently probe the ‘d’ or ‘th’ issue.
A curly one
 |
Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate an example of Murali’s name written in Tamil script, but the ‘th’ or ‘d’ in question seems to correspond to the thalet character, which to the untutored eye looks a little like a nine with a hat. |
I gather that this single character can represent trilled 't', 't-h', trilled 'd', or 'dh', so one really needs to know exactly which sound we are dealing with. Here I find myself stumped, and throw myself on the mercy of suitable scholars.
Readers can form their own uninformed, context free opinion by listening themselves to the sound of thalet at the very helpful http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/plc/tamilweb/mkletter.html.
Still, despite these nuances, the main problem using ‘th’ in the transliteration is that most English speakers pronounce it as in the Greek theta, but in Tamil, ‘th’ is pronounced more like a ‘d’. Similar unEnglish pronunciation of ‘th’ is found in Italian, where it is pronounced like a ‘t’. I mean ‘th’ is pronounced like a ‘t’. Another bugbear is the mispronunciation of the Egyptian goddess cum deity facet Hathor (Mistress of Intoxication for a start). So remember. It is closer to Het-hert than Ha-th-or. This general topic also inevitably brings to mind Mao Zedong.
 |
 |
As one would expect, there is no exact ‘d’ sound in Tamil either, so, to put our finger on the nub, and to gloss over the detail, the conclusion seems to be that the ‘correct’ sound falls somewhere between ‘td’, ‘d’ and ‘t-h’, but not, under any circumstances, ‘th’ as in ‘thin’.
Family
It is worth noting here that Muralidaran is not the family name. Muthiah is. Or is it Mutthiah or perhaps Muttiah? Some even feel that it should be Muthayya.
In Sanskrit and Tamil, Murali means Krishna is his role as a flautist, or even a flutist. One is also reminded that Railways, Lancs and Indian spinner Murali Kartik hails from Chennai in Tamil Nadu, but he is not to be confused with wicketkeeper Krishna Dinesh Karthik.
 |
 |
Around The Grounds
England has been busy and up and down. Undermanned in India, they drew the series by conjuring an inexplicable victory in Mumbai. Or so it seemed until one discovers that at Lunch on the final day, they played Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire in the dressing room. They then went out and took 7-25 in 75 minutes. Back home, they plucked a draw from the jaws of result in the first Test against a plucky Sri Lanka at Lord’s. Plucky being of course derived from boxing slang which alluded to showing pluck, as in hearts being plucked from slaughtered livestock.
Australia won the Test series in South Africa then travelled to the subcontinent to defeat an improved Bangladesh. Warne was glorious.
Cricinfo reports that cricket is taking off in China. In the Chinese tradition, foreign coaches are being shunned in the belief that all obstacles can be overcome through hard work, planning, the setting of goals and the belief that all ball games are similar. The game is now referred to as shen shi yun dong (the Noble Game).
 |