The issue with English is that it is a non-phonetic language. In English, ‘a’ can sound either like æ, eɪ, ɑː, ɔː, etc. I’m pretty sure a French or a German wouldn’t butcher this name, as their alphabets are pretty consistent in phonetic pronunciation.
In Devanagari, it is written as कमला (ka + ma + laa), which is the feminine form of कमल (ka + ma + la). In Hindi (at least, not sure about other Indo-Aryan or Dravidian languages), every varnmala by default has a short ‘a’ - adding a ा turns this into a longer ‘aa’ sound (क् + अ -> क (ka), क् + आ -> का (kaa)).
The issue with English is that it is a non-phonetic language. In English, ‘a’ can sound either like æ, eɪ, ɑː, ɔː, etc. I’m pretty sure a French or a German wouldn’t butcher this name, as their alphabets are pretty consistent in phonetic pronunciation.
In Devanagari, it is written as कमला (ka + ma + laa), which is the feminine form of कमल (ka + ma + la). In Hindi (at least, not sure about other Indo-Aryan or Dravidian languages), every varnmala by default has a short ‘a’ - adding a ा turns this into a longer ‘aa’ sound (क् + अ -> क (ka), क् + आ -> का (kaa)).
It’s 'cause we took the letters from Latin, which actually had 5 vowels, and applied it to a Germanic language which, in my dialect, has 17.
We also standardised the spelling hundreds of years ago, and never updated it, but that’s a sort of separate issue.