Holla Mohalla??
Writing by shinda on Monday, 6 of February , 2006
Something that’s been bothering me for the last while is the spelling of Holaa Mahallaa, as Holla Mohallaa.
No matter where you look, everyone’s writing it as Mohalla, now I don’t know if I missed something but the proper spelling is Mahallaa/Mahullaa.
Now you can argue that I’m being anal about something that could just be linguistic i.e you say To-mate-o’s I say To-mat-o’s , but lets look beyond that. Regardless of how we say it, we still spell it tomatoes.
The way I assume this whole thing even went of track was, someone read the gurmukhi wrong, and remembered it as Mohalla or similarly someone transliterated it, Mohalla, and it started being pronounced Moe-Hulla, with no one knowing any better or just not caring enough, no one cared to fix it, and then it got re-transliterated back into gurmukhi as ?????, and in this copy paste world that we live in, people just stuck with it.
“Hold on, hold on, what proof do you have that you’re right, and everyone else is wrong?”
Well so far from old pictures and videos I have always seen it written ???? ?????, only on the internet and on various English posters have I ever seen it ever written as Mohalla. But then again don’t take my word for it, check out Mahan Kosh, the Sikh Dictionary, and see for yourselves what is written (more importantly how its written) for the entries on Hollaa Mahulaa (for those of you to lazy to check, yes its entered as ???? ?????) .
It’s such cases as the above that have me hating English transliterations. I’m against teaching or starting people of in reading Bani using transliterated Gutka’s. Part of my cynicism towards it comes from me personally having had started of with transliterated Bani’s. Sure it helps in kind of parroting the language but the way most transliterations are done, they are done at some next academia standard which leaves those trying to learn the language in trouble, since you need to basically first learn the transliterated codes and accents.
It also acts as a barrier when learning to read Bani via Gurmukhi, since many times your tongue gets shaped into reading things or saying things the way it was originally picked up, making it that much harder to relearn the proper pronunciation. But for those adamant about their use of using transliterations of Bani’s, I suggest you do so with tapes of individuals who have good ucharan, and try to mimic their pronunciations.
Anyways back to those evil doers who use Mohalla instead of Mahalla, the one that really irked me to write this post was when I saw it on the COSS website, but their not first or last, just another victim of this copy paste era. Other victims can be spotted using Google.
On the bright side, it’s not all bad. Here are a bunch of those that use it properly
In closing, “Now you know, and knowing is half the battle “ – G.I Joe
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Anonymous from 
Made Tuesday, 7 of February , 2006 at 11:12 am
Haha Shinda..its a good thing you got that post edited before you posted it..and another thing, I agree with you Mahalla and muhulla are better ways to transliterate rather than Mohulla. Mohulla just gives a different connotation to it..and you say it all differently ..like moooe- hulla..Like buddy we dont care about moe’s ugly *** from the simpsons..
Anonymous from
Made Tuesday, 7 of February , 2006 at 12:57 pm
transliterations in the first place are a big problem, they should never be made, sure they help people start reading bani, but they also make ppl read bani wrong. If Sikhs would tell their kids to learn moharni before reading bani there would be no need for transliterations.
Anonymous from
Made Friday, 10 of February , 2006 at 7:34 pm
All kids should learn muharni and take santhia.
