Nepal and the case of the silent H’s

The national language of Nepal is Nepali. And while our knowledge of it barely extends beyond “Laso” (which we were told means “cheers”), one thing was quickly apparent – they use a lot of H’s when transliterating to English. Silent H’s.

Many, many Nepali words are written in English with H’s, despite not using the H sound at all (“Kathmandu” is pronounced “Kat-man-du”; “Thamel” is pronounced “Tam-el”; the “Khumbu” glacier is pronounced “Kum-bu”). We’re told the extra(neous) H’s are used to indicate emphasis, but that’s not readily apparent from the words and quite confusing when the words are read. We were going around making lots of “th’s” sounds until somebody finally let us in on the secret.

Moral of the story – when spelling a Nepali word in English, be sure to throw in at least one H, and when reading a Nepali word in English skip all the h’s!