The above address as you can see says Ramakrishna Madam Road, which unfortunately conjures up visions of a road named after a lady who once ran a disorderly house in the vicinity. Several years ago Sringeri devotees took umbrage when the road along their establishment was named Sringeri Madam Road. An alternative may be this:
Sringeri Madam also became Sringeri Mutt. But then Mutt means something else also 🙂 So in some places we see the usage of Math also. But does that not mean something else, though complimentary? The whole problem comes from the usage of a Sanskrit word which can be written in English as Muthum (with the th being the hard pronunciation). But muthum in Tamil means a kiss! So can we then have it as mudum with the u pronounced as in mud? But a mudan (with the u pronounced as oo) is a fool. In Tamil Madam/Math/Mutt/Mudum road should actually be madachalai, which means fools road. And so what do we write? Any ideas?
maThaM as per the accepted Indian languages TRANSliteration (ITRANS), an ASCII transliteration scheme for Indic scripts 🙂
Regards
‘Matam’ should be OK as per Tamilians. We use ‘a’ for the first vowel, not ‘u’. ‘D’ is crtainly not on. It should be ‘t’ or ‘th’. In English ‘th’ is pronounced almost invariably as in Tamizh, except perhaps in ‘Thames’. ‘T’ is hard rather than ‘th’. Tamilians usually write ‘t’ only for both first and second ‘ta’. Thus ‘Matam’ should be acceptable to Tamilians.
ASiramam? One sanskrit word for another!
Not far-fetched because RamakrishnASram (a)is how they call it in other states.