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Languages of India

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Re: Languages of India

#161

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

staticautomatic wrote: post #59
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only Hindi and Punjabi are Aryan. English, Persian, and Portuguese are Indo-European but not Indo-Aryan.

Not Persian? I was under the impression that Hindi is Aryan as a result of the Persian invasion of the Indian subcontinent, which also resulted in the Dravidian languages being pushed south.

There weren't really any major 'Persian' invasions of India. The closest would be the Mughal invasions (the Mughals being Persianised Turco-Mongols), which were relatively recent, in the history of India (16th century A.D.)

There are claims of earlier 'Aryan invasions' of India (nothing to do with Persians), meaning essentially an invasion of Sanskrit speakers into India, though to what degree these migrations were 'invasions' in any sense is unclear.

It is also unclear whether migrations/invasions of these Sanskrit speakers displaced Dravidian speakers. It is clear that both Sanskrit/Indo-Aryan speakers and Dravidian speakers partially displaced earlier Austro-Asiatic (Munda) speakers, who themselves seemed to have displaced yet earlier populations.

Re: Languages of India

#162

Post by selimthegrim »

ignoramous wrote: post #141
lgessler wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is true for Hindi and Urdu, esp when you're exposed to both. When you study both the languages theologically and linguistically, the differences become ever more apparent. It is only the mash of Hindi-Urdu called Hindustani [1] (popularized in modern day by Bollywood) that's mutually intelligible to both Hindi and Urdu speakers alike, and only in its spoken form. You make it sound like everyday Hindi and every…

Thanks. > You make it sound like everyday Hindi and everyday Urdu are far apart, but I'm not sure if that's true: if you took a Pakistani Urdu speaker and an Indian Hindi speaker, both from the middle class with only a modest amount of education (and therefore limited access to specialized vocabulary), both would have no trouble at all talking to each other. Hence this from the parent post: It is only the mash of Hin…

Legal vocabulary in the sense of interacting with the court or revenue system (patwaris, thanedars, kotwals) is still strongly mutually intelligible IIRC

Re: Languages of India

#163

Post by selimthegrim »

owaislone wrote: post #139
jfk13 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In school, perhaps so. But looking at something like https://ur.wikipedia.org/wiki/اردو , there's scarcely more than a handful of short vowel marks ( zabar , zer , pesh , or fatha , kasra , damma as an Arabic speaker would call them) anywhere on the page; the vast majority are left unwritten.

While I'm not 100% sure, I think it _might_ be the case of writing Urdu online vs on paper. I'll try to grab an Urdu book or newspaper tomorrow and see how it is written. Thanks for the insight, this was very interesting.

If you look at say Jang, you will almost never see the diacritics except maybe in headlines

Re: Languages of India

#164

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

sridca wrote: post #88
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original plan was, of course, to phase out English as a national language. This never happened, I suppose partially because while 'Hindustani' (as was) made sense as a symbol of unity during the time leading up to Independence, afterwards, especially as 'Hindi', it was seen more as a regional language (even if the region involved is large) and so not necessarily more deserving of official nation-level status than…

> [English's] own (post-colonial) baggage What are those? It is just a language people speak.

At one point, English could be seen as a foreign language 'imposed' upon India. A language of invaders, etc.

At this point in time, however, English has been present in India for several centuries, and prominently present for at least a century and a half, and has become indigenised (Indian English has its own structure) so it's not really a 'foreign' language anymore.

That said, there are always socio-political dimensions to speaking a particular language variety (think also about dialects, accents etc.). Nothing is ever just a language people speak.

Re: Languages of India

#165

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

School-Cotton wrote: post #100
sridca wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [English's] own (post-colonial) baggage What are those? It is just a language people speak.

Not sure if you are being serious, or what point you're trying to make. English is the language spoken by the people who ruled India as a colony for 200 years (the East India Company for the first hundred; the British state directly for the next).

The East India Company was granted a Royal Charter by Elizabeth I on 31 December 1600, so John Company was in India for even longer than that: originally not as 'rulers' as such, but traders with trading posts (called 'factories' at the time). But traders with warehouses holding precious goods ended up needing security, which turned into private armies, and so on.

Re: Languages of India

#166

Post by random314 »

yumraj wrote: post #155
smallnamespace wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you consider 'similar', 'several', 'language', 'colloquial', or 'doubt' to be English words? All of them are of foreign origin.

I'm not qualified to answer that. Me personally, yes I would. A linguist, I can't say, would perhaps depend on each word and when they became part of the language . Hindi is obviously derived from Sanskrit and other languages. However, Hindi and Urdu are quiet different. Give a word and in most cases most people will be able to tell if it's a Hindi word or an Urdu word.

Clearly you are not qualified to answer the questions, but you keep on answering.

Linguistically there is no difference between Hindi and Urdu. The primary criterion is grammatical structure which is identical in Hindi and Urdu. Writing systems and choice of nouns don't matter either.

Hindi is not obviously derived from Sanskrit. Can a Hindi speaker follow Sanskrit easily or is Punjabi easier? Urdu/Hindi are indirectly derived from Sanskrit and both of them have the same connection to Sanskrit.

The so called pure Hindi/Urdu is a language noone speaks. The artificial text book Hindi which noone speaks was constructed 100 years ago by replacing Persian loanwords with Sanskrit words and writing suitable Sanskrit based dictionaries.

If you are certain that pure Hindi is a thing, please tell us what percentage of Hindi speaking population uses nischit in place of zaroor and why is this minority Hindi pure.

As a side note, language relationships are not dictated by loan words. Otherwise south Indian languages would be considered indo-aryan rather than dravidian. In fact, some south Indian languages use more Sanskrit based words than Hindi.

The only difference between hindi and Urdu is political.

Appendix: list of loanwords from Persian in Hindi, for which nobody uses Sanskrit based equivalents in real life.

Saaya, hamesha, pareshaan, Khushi, sabzi, mehrban, deewar, taaza, darwaaza.

Maybe there is some dude somewhere who uses pratidin instead of Roz - I have never met this mythical creature. Just like using a word like "light* in a Hindi sentence doesn't change the language, neither does using Persian loanwords.

Re: Languages of India

#167

Post by [deleted] »

puranjay wrote: post #70
vikramkr wrote: post #3

The number of languages is stunning. Does anyone know if the number of languages is just the officially named languages or if it includes creoles? The language I speak is a creole of two languages and doesnt have a name or writing system really, and I'm curious to know how that is counted.

From the top of my head as a very lay person, I can count several languages that are not only completely distinct but also completely alien to me as a Hindi speaker: Marathi, Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malyalam. These are major languages and form the basis of a lot of state boundaries.

[deleted]

Re: Languages of India

#168

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

staticautomatic wrote: post #157
xkgt wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The commonly accepted view right now is that there was an Aryan migration and not an invasion over the Indian subcontinent. But there are politically motivated narratives abound that are pushing this theory to either extremes (Aryan immigration theory vs Aryan == Dravidian theory). Please don't trigger a flame war. It is surprising as it is that this topic hasn't triggered one yet.

Whether one calls it an invasion or a migration (I take no side), the Dravidians headed south around that time, no?

It's not really clear. There are pockets of Dravidians outside of the 'Dravidian south', but in some cases these seem to represent later migrations.

And in Sri Lanka both Indo-Aryan (Sinhala) and Dravidian (Tamil) speakers seemed to have arrived around the same time.

Re: Languages of India

#169

Post by selimthegrim »

shripadk wrote: post #84
owaislone wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is so blatantly false. I am from South and a Kannadiga and I can tell you with conviction that in my lifetime I have never had anyone impose Hindi on me. May be. I only think this because I've been so this by many people from South India and I'd rather take their word over the state's. Also, even if it is just a perception, it means such things were definitely attempted by the center. Perceptions don't just fo…

> That means a tightly integrated and mostly centrally controlled state cannot function either if there are multiple religions identities present in the country which by extension means that the state of J&K has no place in present day India. It doesn't. That is the reason why you see so much bloodshed with one side trying to overpower the other. J&K is not homogenous. The Jammu part is majority Hindu and Kashmir par…

In 1983 when Farooq Abdullah wanted to use J and K’s autonomy to repatriate Jammu Muslims (comparable to if not greater in number than Pandits), Indira Gandhi came in and campaigned on the issue as ‘infiltration’ and her son left the Pandits to twist in the wind in the resulting backlash. In 1978, she sponsored the Sant Nirankari sect in Punjab while giving Bhindranwale a free hand to attack these ‘heretics’ at the same time. My grandfather fled his birthplace of Gulbarga in 1948 after watching Indian Army kill civilians. Please tell me more about Nehru-Gandhi secularism.

Re: Languages of India

#170

Post by iamshs »

ignoramous wrote: post #141
lgessler wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is true for Hindi and Urdu, esp when you're exposed to both. When you study both the languages theologically and linguistically, the differences become ever more apparent. It is only the mash of Hindi-Urdu called Hindustani [1] (popularized in modern day by Bollywood) that's mutually intelligible to both Hindi and Urdu speakers alike, and only in its spoken form. You make it sound like everyday Hindi and every…

Thanks. > You make it sound like everyday Hindi and everyday Urdu are far apart, but I'm not sure if that's true: if you took a Pakistani Urdu speaker and an Indian Hindi speaker, both from the middle class with only a modest amount of education (and therefore limited access to specialized vocabulary), both would have no trouble at all talking to each other. Hence this from the parent post: It is only the mash of Hin…

Punjabi dialects do vary in vocabulary. Just go to Indian Punjab, and converse with people from Majha, Malwa, Doaba or Poadh. You will instantly find differences. Singers from Majha sometimes use vocab that needs help translating.
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