Live data from Hacker News

Languages of India

en.wikipedia.org

171–180 of 252 posts

Re: Languages of India

#171
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 indirect…

Over and out.

Re: Languages of India

#172
post #128

A co-worker of mine once said then he heard a greater variety of spoken Indian languages in the Bay Area than he’d ever heard back in India, where he was born and educated. Never thought of a polite way to ask, but I’ve always been curious as to how many Indian co-workers of mine share a language other than English - seems like the number could be lower than expected, given the sheer amount of different languages.

Your co-worker's observation is actually more obvious than we think it is. Since states in India are essentially divided based on linguistic grounds, he would have been exposed to two Indian languages at best - the regional language in his town and Hindi (if the dominant language in the town is not Hindi already). In the Bay Area you'll find people from various states of India.

Similarly, there is a wider variety of European languages spoken in New York than in a village in France.

Re: Languages of India

#173
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 indirect…

Crossing into personal attack will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone is. Doubly so when the topic is divisive, for example as nationalistic topics are.

Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit the incivilities out of your comments here in the future? We'd appreciate it.

Re: Languages of India

#174
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 indirect…

Over and out.

Crossing into personal attack will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone is. Doubly so when the topic is divisive, for example as nationalistic topics are.

Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit the incivilities out of your comments here in the future? We'd appreciate it.

Re: Languages of India

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not about how a language can be misused. The misuse of language is secondary. Again, use of language as a way to signal group identity and block out others is not "misuse" of a language. It is an inherent part of the human language faculty, it is normal usage. I know that in a venue like this who many participants are developers or sympathetic to the software community, there is a tendency to think of human languag…

> It is an inherent part of the human language faculty, it is normal usage If it is normal usage then there is nothing to fear right? This logic makes no sense because I don't see this happening with other regional languages vis-a-vis Hindi. > a danger illustrated by numerous case studies all over the world Are you telling me that Hindi speaking people are deliberately targeting Tamil and Malayalam while giving a fre…

[deleted]

Re: Languages of India

#176
post #23

This may be a long shot, but could anybody help me find a Bible in Oriya? Last year I did some research into Unicode PUA characters and discovered some unencoded Taiwanese & Hakka characters. I wrote a proposal to add them to Unicode, and a blog post on Medium (called Hakka news). Now I've done the same for all languages on Bible.com, and I'm trying to compare with printed copies to know what the text should say.

You can find an online version here https://vachanonline.com/ . If you are looking for the data, here is a repository: https://git.door43.org/BCS-BIBLE/Odiya-ULB-NT.BCS That is the New Testament only, the Old Testament can be found in the same way.

I can already get the online version!

The trouble is that I can see some PUA codes being used in the text.

https://www.bible.com/bible/1749/1KI.4.20.ODIAOV-BSI

https://www.bible.com/bible/1749/2KI.16.17.ODIAOV-BSI

https://www.bible.com/bible/1749/ROM.6.16.ODIAOV-BSI

No idea if these will appear in the comment, but let's try:

 U+F020  U+F02F  U+F0A0

If I can compare to scans of a printed copy, then I'll be able to know what the characters should be (and therefore whether they're already in Unicode).

Re: Languages of India

#177
post #8

This may be a long shot, but could anybody help me find a Bible in Oriya? Last year I did some research into Unicode PUA characters and discovered some unencoded Taiwanese & Hakka characters. I wrote a proposal to add them to Unicode, and a blog post on Medium (called Hakka news). Now I've done the same for all languages on Bible.com, and I'm trying to compare with printed copies to know what the text should say.

Try https://odia.bible ?

It's the right translation! I emailed them, but they don't really understand my question and take a long time to reply.

Re: Languages of India

#178
post #12

India's right wing government under Modi is trying to impose Hindi on Indians who belong to different ethnicity and speak diverse set of languages. A sure shot recipe for balkanization of a young nation.

I can say for sure - the right wing government want to impose a common identity across the nation which is a very bad idea.

Not just the languages - we have vast differences but find unity in diversity. Inclusiveness is what makes India tick. As a Tamilian i don't think we will ever allow Hindi to be enforced on us. But our first Identity is more of an Indian than a Tamilian. India is quite a fabric and we should cherish the diversity.

Re: Languages of India

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. As a Romanian speaker I can’t understand more than very basic Italian. Perhaps Spanish is slightly more understandable but still not to a 90% level for sure. I also doubt they understand any Romanian at all.

Romanian kept its case system unlike the other Romance languages by virtue of ending up in the Slavic sprachbund. I'd wager that there are Slavic loanwords as well?

11-14%

> A statistical analysis sorting Romanian words by etymological source carried out by Macrea (1961)[88] based on the DLRM[99] (49,649 words) showed the following makeup:[89]

> 43% recent Romance loans (mainly French: 38.42%, Latin: 2.39%, Italian: 1.72%) 20% inherited Latin 11.5% Slavic (Old Church Slavonic: 7.98%, Bulgarian: 1.78%, Bulgarian-Serbian: 1.51%) 8.31% Unknown/unclear origin 3.62% Turkish 2.40% Modern Greek 2.17% Hungarian 1.77% German (including Austrian High German)[97] 2.24% Onomatopoeic If the analysis is restricted to a core vocabulary of 2,500 frequent, semantically rich and productive words, then the Latin inheritance comes first, followed by Romance and classical Latin neologisms, whereas the Slavic borrowings come third.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_language

Re: Languages of India

#180

The diversity in general in India is mind boggling which most of Indians take for granted. Be it terrain, climate, language, culture, food, etc., And all the above change noticeably every 200KM or so such that you will find more similarities between Delhi and Lahore (different countries) than Delhi and Bangalore. It's a miracle that India manages to function as one country.

The West expected India to be a failed state within a decade of independance. There were 584 princely states and hundreds of linguistic, religious and cultural minorities to integrate within one country. Compare India to Yugoslavia which broke up violently along ethnic lines or to Sri Lanka which had a bloody civil war that lasted 25 years. Or the division of Pakistan into Bangladesh along racial and linguistic lines…

Also mentioned in India After Gandhi.
Post reply on HN