zaabaa fen!
More than 50,000 of you have tried to convert your names and your friend’s names in KiLiKi using our Image It tool. Most of you have got it right.
‘rita’ ‘Rita’ ‘reeta’ & ‘reetaa’ are all totally different sounds and characters in KiLiKi. Here is a quick guide for you to get your name right.
KiLiKi Keyboard Mapping
KiLiKi is a strictly phonetic language. This means that there is only one correct way to pronounce what you write and there is only one way to produce a certain sound. As you can see in the images below KiLiKi is case sensitive when we use an English keyboard.
Key ‘a’ produces the character representing the short vowel ‘a’ the sound of the vowel in the English word ‘cut’. Similarly key ‘A’ produces the character representing the long vowel ‘aa’ the sound of the vowel in the English word ‘card’
Key ‘X’ produces the sound representing the long vowel ‘Á’ the sound of the vowel in ‘apple’
Similarly for consonants you can press the key ‘b’ to get the soft consonant sound ‘b’ as in English word ‘bat’ and press the key ‘S’ or keys ‘sh’ to produce the character that represents the soft consonant sound ‘sh’ as in the word ‘share’
Note the alternate keys. We can type ‘c’ or ‘ch’ or ‘C’ to produce the symbol that represents the hard consonant sound ‘ch’ as in the English word ‘chip’.
The stressed ‘L’ sound is part of a few languages around the world. When we want to stress the ‘l’ sound we can press the upper case ‘L’ key to produce a hard consonant with sound ‘L’. Note the name KiLiKi is pronounced with a stressed version of ‘L’.
Mono consonants have pretty much an easy correlation with the keys and sounds they produce. We have to note here that both lower case ‘m’ and upper case ‘M’ produce the same character representing the mono consonant sound ‘m’ as in English word ‘moon’. Whereas, the lower case ‘r’ is used to produce the ‘r’ sound as in English word ‘ram’ but the upper case ‘R’ is reserved for the click sound ‘*rrr’. You can listen to the audio of how these sounds will be uttered in our Learn KiLiKi Alphabet page.
As we will not be needing click sounds for your name we will ignore them in this article. If you are planning to name your kids with click sounds, that will make an interesting story by itself.
If you pronounce your name as ‘reetaa’ with all long vowels, you can type ‘reetaa’ in the imageit tool to convert it phonetically in KiLiKi. In case you pronounce ‘ritaa’ with a short ‘i’ sound and long ‘aa’ in the end, you can type and convert ‘ritaa’. Please note do not use upper case ‘R’ as ‘Rita’ will produce a click sound R followed by ‘ita’ which is incorrect.
In the above example, for the name ‘alladin’ there are many spellings possible. ‘allaadheen’ ‘alaadhin’ and many other variant. Decide if the name must be pronounced with a ‘din’ ending or a ‘dhin’ ending. If you use ‘Alladin’ with a upper case ‘A’ you end up getting a name that must be pronounced with a long vowel ‘aa lla din’.
To write ‘Harry Potter’ we type ‘hXri pAtar’. This is the right way to write his name in KiLiKi. Because, ‘if we type the keys ‘harry potter’ it will produce a different sound as the consonant ‘y’ takes the sound ‘y’ as in the english word ‘you’.
If we pronounce ‘abdhul’ instead of ‘abdul’ it is better to type ‘abdhul’ to get the sound right in KiLiKi. Similarly if we are used to writing ‘kalam’ but we pronounce it as ‘kalaam’ it is correct to type in ‘kalaam’ to get the sound right in KiLiKi.
KiLiKi does not have the vowels ‘ou’ that is available in many languages. So, to get the ‘ou’ sound as in the word ‘about’ we can key in ‘abavt’ to get the same sound. In short, ‘ou’ will be replaced by ‘av’ to produce the same sound. That is the reason we see that the popular name ‘Rajamouli’ is typed in as ‘raajamavli’ to get the sound right in KiLiKi.
Similarly, KiLiKi does not have the vowel ‘ai’ that is present in many languages. Instead, we key in ‘ay’ to replace the ‘ai’ sound that we get in words like ‘haiku’. So we key in ‘hayku’ to get the sound right in KiLiKi.
Let us check out a few popular names and how to type them in KiLiKi.
Try writing your name and post it to your friends and family. Change your DP with your name in KiLiKi. Post your doubts in comments or connect to us on twitter @kilikiworld.
bazaa!