‘I’ before ‘e,’ except after ‘c’
on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008, 3:28 am in Media › 
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Hoarding
Sunday, March 2
Yeah. Eejits. Though you know what’s funny, old-time Delhi-wallahs actually pronounce it “Dehli” and apparently that’s how the Persian word is pronounced and written too (????), as in the “Dehli Urdu Akhbar” newspaper.
Um, I was trying to enter the word in Urdu script but it didn’t work, hence the question marks.
Yes, it’s ‘Dehli’ in Urdu, and people from ‘Dehli’ are ‘Dehlavis’. It’s ‘Dilli’ in local Hindi, especially as in ‘Naiee Dilli’. How long before the English spelling becomes ‘Dilli’ like ‘Mumbai’, but with more justification?
My guess for why it was transliterated as ‘Delhi’ is - it’s similar to Delphi, a place-name familiar to Englishmen who studied Classics :)
Fuck the persian origin and old-time Delhi-wallahs - that ain’t how it’s written/said no more.
WaPo dumbasses should thank their lucky stars that the city hasn’t been renamed already to Indraprastha. Or if it were, they probably would have bothered their uppity asses to do a spell-check.
Also, it would be cool to see Hillary try to pronounce Indraprashta: indrapsa…indiapsapsa… indwhatever.
Gruhasthu - LMAO! I guess enough indignant desis wrote in because they corrected the spelling on the site some hours later.
If it makes you feel any better, as someone who has worked as a copy editor, I can guarantee you there is a WaPo proofreader/copy editor who is going to see that headline in his or her nightmares for the next decade. And will probably never live it down in the newsroom either.
Really, it’s not that big a deal. Nobody’s perfect, certainly not the copy editors at the WaPo.
But then, what would blogs be if we couldn’t pull up the MSM short now and then, even while we bend ourselves out of shape trying to dig up the precise clip in which they refer to us!
Dehli khuund ke rakh do.
google news gives 75 hits for Dehli. 113 for Ghandi.