Get ready to learn new English spellings for Tamil Nadu cities

What is in a name? Well, there are a lot, at least to 1,018 cities, towns, and areas within cities in Tamil Nadu.

As part of an initiative taken up in 2018 to change anglicised names of cities and towns to their original names in Tamil and altering their English spelling, the government has now released an order effecting changes.

Accordingly, Coimbatore, the industrial city known as Manchester of South India, is now Koyampuththoor, the port city of Tuticorin is Thooththukkudi and Vellore is now Veeloor.

Ninety-six localities in Chennai, including Mylapore, Guindy, Saidapet, Ambattur, and Meenambakkam, have also undergone changes in the way their names are written in English.

Mylapore is now Mayilaappoor, Guindy is Gindi, Saidapet is Saithaappettai, Ambattur is Ambaththoor, and Meenambakkam that houses the city’s airport has added an extra ‘a’ to be written as Meenambaakkam.

The changes were made in April in the form of a Government Order and were released on June 10 by the government. The order says district collectors and a high-level committee headed by Tamil Development Minister ‘MaFoi’ K Pandiarajan looked into the issue and came up with new names or spellings.

The municipal authorities in the state will now be tasked with the job of making changes in official documents. The order also became a major topic of discussion on social media, especially Twitter, with netizens wondering how they would remember these spellings while writing names of the cities.

Some also felt the timing was wrong as the government order was released in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic in the state. One Twitter user was so brutal that he said all the committee did was to add letters like ‘a’ ‘t’ and ‘k’ in between the existing names.

“The renaming of anglicised names into Tamil is another exercise in waste and an ill-timed move. If the Govt had wanted only Tamil names, it should have concentrated on removing use of Sanskrit words from Tamil names & literatures. That would have made Tamil richer and purer,” a woman who tweets via @TamizhRatsaschi wrote on Twitter.

Political analyst Sumanth C Raman also said the move would not solve any problem. “Is this really important, especially in the middle of a pandemic??? How do people remember how many 'A' s each of these names have when they write them? And what problem does it really solve?” he asked.