Dosa Samosa

Learned Volume 5, Issue 35

This week: Indian food is one of the most popular international cuisines on the market. But how do you actually pronounce the names of all those dishes? We get into it below. Read on!

Big in Japan

I mean, dude ain’t wrong, you know?

Indian food is big in Japan¹. Bigger than Italian or French, easier to find than Chinese or Korean, in Japan, you are never more than a stone's throw from a decent Indian place. My local favorite has had its ups and downs during the pandemic, but they've come through and I managed to get in for lunch this weekend.

Now, the thing you have to know is that I am a creature of habit. When my wife and I had our honeymoon in Spain and Italy, we splurged on gelato most days. My wife would ask for samples and try something new every time. Not me. On day one I pegged coconut and pistachio as the perfect flavor combination and never strayed. Not even once. I like to think this shows how decisive and commanding I can be. My wife uses it as an example of how intractable and stubborn I can be. The truth, as with most truths, is somewhere in the middle.

Now, on the far side of the pandemic, after more than two years of not going to restaurants very much, I'm trying to change. I'm no longer tossing the menu away without even looking at it; I'm not just getting the lunch set and calling it a day. I'm actually, you know, thinking about what I'm getting. It's a strange feeling, but I'm adjusting.

So, back to Indian food. As I said, we managed to get out to my favorite place for the first time in a while. And I actually read through the menu. I ended up with a very nice "dosa samosa" set². But here's the thing: I realized I don't actually know how to say either of those words.

See, the menu for this restaurant was...wait for it...in Japanese. Shocker, right? So, when I say I don't know how to say those words I mean, I don't know how to say them in Hindi³. And that could be excused as, after all, I have had very little exposure to the Hindi language and most of what I have had was in the form of Bollywood musicals. But I also realized I wasn’t sure of the accepted English pronunciation.

I was twenty-five years old the first time I ever went to an Indian restaurant and it was here in Japan. Where I’m from in the States⁴, Indian food just wasn’t a thing. But some friends wanted to go to this new place and did I want to tag along and one thing led to another and I was hooked. Soon words like masala, chicken tiki, and tandoori were entering my vocabulary. But, as I said, I learned all these words through reading Japanese menus. I could presume that the pronunciations would not be dissimilar, mainly a question of vowels and blends, but I got curious so I decided to look things up.

What I found was…nothing, really. Okay, the Japanese pronunciation leans hard into the first vowel sound of both words, pronouncing samosa as sah-mo-sa and dosa and doh-sa, whereas the English pronunciations⁵ varied all over the damn place, mostly hitting the front syllables as an eh sound rather than an ah sound, seh-mo-sa⁶. The Hindi pronunciation, it turns out, is kind of half-way between, using closer to a seh than a sa, in the first syllable, but elongating the last syllable and rising slightly at the end⁷.

Dosa, on the other hand, well, dosa was a little bit of a journey that hasn’t quite finished, mainly because it isn’t very consistent. Not only is there a wild variety in just what kind of thin pancakes can be called dosa and what kind of ingredients can go into them, there are a whole lot of dosa-like words in a whole host of languages to refer to the dish. From Wikipedia:

A dosa, also called dosai, dosey, or dosha…

Turtle speaks with a refined voice, but make no mistake, he’s going to be on the right side of the revolution.

So we end up back where we started: how do I say these words? And the answer is…it doesn’t really matter. Human pronunciation is a far, far broader spectrum than we like to admit. Put any dozen English speakers in a room and ask them to read the same text and you’ll get a much wider variation in pronunciation across individual words than I researched for this article. We routinely listen through mistakes, changes, and unfamiliar blends to find meaning in each other’s utterances based on the context of the situation at the time.

In this one instance, was my Japanese pronunciation of this Indian dish’s name perfect? Probably not. And yet, the waitress understood me without my having to point at the menu, so, close enough. So we call it a win and move on.

The point is, food is a fantastic entry point into other languages⁸. In the space of a single meal, we can be exposed to the culture and context of a given language and use that as a basis to begin our explorations of it. And if you can get all that and a savory pancake, so much the better!

Down the Rabbit Hole:

Just a quick one this week; as I was putting this week’s letter together, I got an email notification that a new and revised version of The Ultimate Annual Review is available and ready for download. If you’re not familiar with it already, the review is just what it sounds like - a booklet of exercises and worksheets that help you look back and assess your goals and achievements as well as plan for the year ahead. Good luck!

From the Archives:

Related to this week’s Rabbit Hole is a concept I have been practicing for a few years, that of a commonplace book. And, like with the Review, setting up or looking back through a year’s worth of entries is a good way of taking stock or planning ahead. So, this week’s archive goes back to Volume Three, Issue 34, Common Place. Enjoy!

Common Place

1. It is so popular, in fact, that curry has been adopted as a native Japanese food. The full history is long and kind of strange, but it starts in India and ends up in Japan during the Meiji Restoration. I say that it's become an adopted national dish because at Indian restaurants, they will often offer Japanese curry on the menu as Wafu (Japanese style) Curry. My mother-in-law gets it every time.

2. I’m not even getting into the whole “authentic Indian food” thing because, for the most part, anyone who’s stressing over how authentic a restaurant’s food is, is probably trying to sell you a cookbook. Or champagne.

3. Assuming that they are actual Hindi words and not neologisms, portmanteaus, or other borrowings derived from somewhere vaguely in the direction of India.

4. I grew up in the Sonoran desert. Eating real, authentic Mexican food is quite different from what you find in a lot of American Mexican food places. And don't get me wrong, I love some Tex-Mex, but if you order a chimichanga in Mexico, you're going to get some funny looks.

5. Source: a bunch of not-very-interesting YouTube videos I can’t be bothered to link.

6. Because some of you just can’t get enough of the #$%&@ IPA, here’s the Wiktionary versions for samosa. English: saˈmosa, Japanese: sa̠mo̞sa̠, Hindi: s̪ə.moː.s̪äː

7. Source: Shabdkosh.com for Samosa.

8. If you're into languages, either as a student or hobbyist, learning how the names of dishes are pronounced in their state of origin is one of the better ways of sorting out the basic pronunciation of a language. Sometimes it can even help you out with grammar by understanding how the different parts of a word come together to form a whole.