231–240 of 252 posts
Lost among here is Sentinelese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese_language The only language where not a single word is known to the outside world!
On some level you have to respect a people whose response to anthropologists is to see how many arrows they can stick in them.
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.
While it is true they are trying to do it, it's not anything new as Delhi has for decades tried to impose Hindi on all states and the southern ones don't take it well. That said, I don't think this can result in balkanization of India as generally India is way more united in-spite of issues like Delhi seen as having way too much control over the states (which is true in my opinion). Also, IMO, balkanization of the In…
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.
I've discovered that they generally share the same native language when they are from the same region in India, otherwise they don't. The only exception I've seen so far in Punjabi, since it seems that Delhi also has a significant population of Punjabi speakers who have migrated there from Punjab, which is farther to the west.
Sometimes my coworkers do share languages, and that's obvious if I hear them speaking to each other in a language other than English. Sometimes they have to speak English to each other because that's their only common language.
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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.
> In the Bay Area you'll find people from various states of India. Doesn't the same thing happen within India itself, due to internal interstate migration? Not everyone who works in (for example) Bangalore's IT industry grew up there.
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I knew or could guess about influences from the other three, but didn't really know about influences from Portuguese - interesting. Got any examples? Only one I can think of right now is kaju in Hindi for cashew, which I think may be from Portuguese because I think I've read the Portuguese brought the cashew tree to India [1]. Okay, pao or pav [2] for a particular kind of bread in Mumbai and Maharashtra may be anothe…
Another example is "vindaloo", from "vinho d'alho" ('garlic wine'). Over in Japan, "tempura" is from a Latin reference to the holiday of Lent, as used by Portuguese people in Japan. (At that time the Catholic Portuguese would eat fried fish or fried vegetables.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempura#Etymology (edit: it seems that the original reference is to four different seasons of religious fasts, not just to the…
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Not really. In dense areas, you often have far more diverse populations, as cities attrat people with different traditions and backgrounds. But in a place with as many social groups as India, these people often maintain many of their customs and habits even in the dense urban context, resulting in a great variety within a small area.
Within the same city, the Hindu majority areas will look and feel noticeably different from the Muslim majority areas. The culture, and sometimes even language, is different.
Even within the Hindu majority areas, the look, feel, and even language is noticeably different between the different Hindu subgroups.
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I wonder why some countries (like India) have so much diversity, while others (like Russia) have so little...
Russia does have plenty of linguistic diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Russia
People in this thread say: "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"
In Russia, you can travel 2000km in any direction from the center, and see no noticeable difference in terms of people, culture, food, or language. There can a be a slight accent in some regions, but nothing as dramatic as say accents in US.
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Is चाभी a Hindi word?
Hindi and Urdu both. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%9A%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%AD%E...
Likewise, निश्चित certainly isn't Hindi in this narrow sense. It's a direct borrowing from Sanskrit, not a native, inherited word of the language.
And Hindi (हिन्दी) itself isn't a Hindi word; it's Persian (likewise Hindu).
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Hindi and Urdu both. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%9A%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%AD%E...
Sorry, it was supposed to be rhetorical. It's a borrowing from Portuguese, so by the standards yumraj seems to be employing it shouldn't count as Hindi. Likewise, निश्चित certainly isn't Hindi in this narrow sense. It's a direct borrowing from Sanskrit, not a native, inherited word of the language. And Hindi (हिन्दी) itself isn't a Hindi word; it's Persian (likewise Hindu ).
If we discount direct borrowings from Sanskrit, I guess there would be very little left. Something like Pali, essentially.