Comma-la (as she tells us to pronounce it), or even Com'la (as it is traditionally pronounced)
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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Thank you for this. I’ve heard her name mispronounced so often that I genuinely thought kah-MALL-uh was correct. Whoops! Comma-la it is!
Happy to help!
Oh, I shoulda linked to a first-hand source where she herself wrote "comma-la" as the pronunciation (no particular accent on syllables). It is in her book, and also towards the bottom of this piece has that excerpts from her book: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/book-excerpt-kamala-harris-truths-hold/story?id=60234101
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Commala? As in the pokemon Komala?
So it really is Komala Harris vs Trumpshoos
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"Comma-la" unfortunately doesn't help much for people without US accents lol (though of course people in the US are who the question and answer are most relevant to). On first reading -- without the accent or something close to it -- it implies "kom-uh-luh", whereas with the accent it implies something more like "kah-muh-luh", just based on how people pronounce "comma" differently.
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Obama, Obamala, 'bamala, Kamala
Whoa Black Betty, 'bamala
That's one of the cleverest pronunciation guides I've ever seen.
Thanks Obamala.
Oh shit here come the conspiracy theories now....
Guise. Guise. They're both black.... Dons tinfoil hat
Tomorrow on Alex Jones' podcast: Kamala Harris is actually Barrack Obama in drag. It's all part of his nefarious plan to subverting term limits and force Healthcare on everyone.
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..Fee-fi fo-mala, Kah-malllah! 🎵
Comma-la
However she pronounces it.
Right right right
and that would be ... ?
Oh, I found the video on her Youtube channel literally addressing this question back in 2016:
Comma-luh
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KAH-muh-luh HAER-is
Kamala (/ˈkɑːmələ/) Harris (/ˈhærɪs/)
Fun fact.
In Finnish "kamala" means "awful".
We are gonna have endless dad jokes with this one.
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"Kamala"
Karma-la... But drop the 'r'
The Indian (Sanskrit) name is pronounced ka-ma-laa (meaning lotus), with no stress, and no gap in between the syllables. The first two 'a's are pronounced like the 'u' in rum, while the last is the same sound but longer (so like the 'a' in calm).
The US Presidential candidate's name is pronounced the way she likes, which in this case is closer to ko-ma-laa.
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/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.
,-la
Anyone have the IPA pronunciation?
/kəmələ/ is the sound. Since she's half-Dravidian, we don't do schwa deletion over here.
Edit: /kəmələ/, not /kə.mə.lə/
My friend, Americans do not care about how words are pronounced in the original language/location.
Some of us do.
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Anyone else craving olives after reading this thread?
Watch miss marvel and listen how her mother calls her.
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