What’s in a name? Or rather, the accent that goes into its making? A
little squiggle can say so much.
The family tree creation
website I am a member of, notified me that I had received a message. Checking
my inbox, I saw that the email had come from someone with an impressively
hyphenated surname, its many syllables redolent of nineteenth century colonial literature
where such elaborate appellations were markers of aristocratic marriage
alliances between suitably matched houses. Intrigued, I opened the electronic
missive expecting a reconnection with a long lost relative with an illustrious
past. Alas, the message, shorter even than the name of its sender, made up in
temerity what it lacked in length. “It should be Ferrão”, my
would-be patrician relative informed (nose turned up in the air, I imagined),
referring to my online rendering of my last name sans tilde.
I shall come to reveal the
secret of the missing accent soon, but permit me a while to reminisce about my
personal acquaintance with that little squiggle that adorns my name. When I was
eight, in preparation for sending me off to boarding school in India, my
parents labelled all my things with my name. Though they said it was to protect
against theft, it was perhaps their way of reminding me that they were still
with me, despite the distance. At school, I would often look at the indelible
ink on the inside of my shirt collars and recall my dad’s efforts. His oldest sister,
who had dropped by to see me off, decided to stay and help my parents out.
Entrusted with writing my own name in the books that I would be taking to
school, I busied myself with the task, careful not to make a mistake while
trying to impress my aunt who was watching my penmanship.
“You missed something”. I
looked up quizzically. Relieving me of book and pen, my aunt added the little
wavy line above our family name. “There”, she announced. “Now, you’re done”.
Although I had seen the curlicue mark before, it had never dawned on me that it
was actually part of my name. It certainly hadn’t been covered in cursive
writing class. “What is it?” I enquired of my aunt. “It’s called a tilde”, she
explained, “and when you see it over the letter ‘a’ which is next to an ‘o’,
you know you have to say those two letters together through your nose. Like
this”. She demonstrated, and I laughed at the funny sound she made. I had met
my tilde for the first time and I decided that I liked the miniscule chap.
For Goans, especially those
with a Catholic heritage residing outside Goa, it is not an uncommon experience
to encounter folks who wonder at the seeming disjunction between the colour of
our skin and the Europeanness of our names. And yet, even Iberian culture is
not without its own miscegeny, what with the over seven century presence of the
Moors on the peninsula resulting in such monikers as Almodôvar
and Fátima, among others. Nonetheless, Goan names are exactly that. Even as
these names may have their roots in histories of colonialism and conversion, in
the same way that Goans have adapted Catholicism in uniquely local ways, so too
have Portuguese names come to signify endemically Goan culture. For instance,
in Goa, when one hears the name ‘Vasco’, it hardly conjures up the plume-hatted
European navigator of José Veloso Salgado’s 1898 painting, Vasco da Gama perante o Samorim.
The worldwide ubiquity of the English language has
meant that, for many, the skill of vocalizing the nasalized sounds so common in
Portuguese is one that takes practice. In turn, this has manifested in the
dropping of diacritical marks in the written version of once-sonorous
Portuguese words and names, out of convenience and custom. But I would argue
that Anglicization has also influenced technology. And to illustrate my point,
I must come now to my confession of how I lost my tilde. To my interlocutor,
the one who wrote to enquire after my missing online accent, know that it was
not misplaced and that I have been aware of its place in my name for some time now.
Rather, its disappearance was due to the fact that I am a luddite. I did not
know how to use my computer’s keyboard to bend into shape the 451 years of
Portuguese colonization that produced the squiggle that my Goan family proudly
made its own.
From The Goan.
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