Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to count every language in India (2018)

atlasobscura.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 128 posts

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#81

Post by bakul »

yumraj wrote: post #59
quadrifoliate wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With so many, where do you draw the line? The whole issue of language v/s dialect is a complex one; but I have adjusted to the one in this popular article [1]: if you speak a language and can enter into a conversation with a speaker of a variation on that language relatively easily, it qualifies as a dialect. > A Mandarin-speaker can no more “adjust” to Cantonese than a Swede could “adjust” to German. Most of the w…

Bhojpuri, Maithili, Haryanwi, Braj, Bundelkhandi, dialects from Rajasthan, Himachal and so and so forth, and I'll say even Khari boli are all dialects of Hindi. We may not be able to have a fluent conversation, but for most part we'll understand the context and will be able to speak. In fact Hindi dialects change every 100km or so I'll say in the Hindi belt. Punjabi, Gujrati, Marathi and others (picking from areas ne…

Gujarati has its own script, fairly similar to Devanagari but without the horizontal bar above letters and a few more changes. Marathi uses Devanagari.

I believe both Urdu and Hindi came from Hindustani which was derived from Khari Boli.

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#82

Post by guruparan18 »

ido66667 wrote: post #79
yorwba wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not possible to read at the get go, but after some practice, yes, any one can read old Tamil. The "after some practice" makes this a bit of a squishy claim. For example, Malayalam and Tamil split less than 1000 years ago and are both descendants of Old Tamil. I would be surprised if "after some practice" a Malayalam speaker couldn't also read Old Tamil, or for that matter Modern Tamil (and vice versa for a Mo…

There are many methods to try to determine how an ancient language was spoken, all of them by definition hypothetical, but since linguistic change does follow sensical rules, and happens in gradual steps (i.e. you can almost be sure that the vowel /u/ won't shift to the vowel /a/ in a single generation, and I bet there isn't a single recorded case of that happening, simply because /u/ and /a/ are very far away from e…

Fortunately, there are Tamil poems written around 200 CE that are still readable and understandable by native speaker. Tamil poems follow strict grammar and structural rules for poems, so they don't change over time (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venpa).

Here is poem that speaks about children being joyous, and how they playfully eat food. A simple ordeal in everyday life. Its about 7 lines and everyday speaker still understands all of it.

https://365paa.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/063/ (poorely translated: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...)

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#83

Post by dragandj »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #54
ffpip wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hockey was more popular in India in last century than it is now. It won Olympic medals so people started calling it 'National Sport'. Then cricket's popularity blew up (it was popular, it just increased a lot). A fun question people ask here in India is 'What is the national sport of India?'. Most people reply cricket, few 'intellectuals' say hockey, but there is no national sport.

I think that since international cricket is more popular than international hockey, non-Indians know a lot about Indian cricket than hockey.

Hmmm, I'm from South-East Europe, and the only times I remember hearing a lot about cricket is from Lewis Carroll, and from Indian news. I'm not how many people in Europe, North America, South America, Africa, China, etc. know that cricket exists. They don't care much about hockey either (the grass one), so you might be right, but only because 0.0001% is larger than 0.00001% :)

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#84

Post by dragonwriter »

dragandj wrote: post #83
srtjstjsj wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that since international cricket is more popular than international hockey, non-Indians know a lot about Indian cricket than hockey.

Hmmm, I'm from South-East Europe, and the only times I remember hearing a lot about cricket is from Lewis Carroll, and from Indian news. I'm not how many people in Europe, North America, South America, Africa, China, etc. know that cricket exists. They don't care much about hockey either (the grass one), so you might be right, but only because 0.0001% is larger than 0.00001% :)

> I'm not how many people in Europe, North America, South America, Africa, China, etc. know that cricket exists.

Lots of people in the places that were part of the British Empire other than in continental North America (where for some reason it had less staying power) which includes all of those places except South America (if you count the West Indies as part of North America.) It's popular some other places, too.

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#85

Post by selimthegrim »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #67
dilippkumar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be interested in David McAlpin’s 2015 paper about Brahui, Elamite and Proto-Dravidian [0]. Some context: Brahui is a language spoken in Pakistan that’s been a bit of a mystery till David McAlpin solved it with the proto-zagrosian hypothesis. Brahui clearly looks like related to Dravidian, but didn’t fit into proto-dravidian or any reconstructed daughter languages of proto-dravidian. Simultaneously, the anci…

That is interesting indeed! I skimmed over the paper, although most of it is too dense for me to understand. A proven connection between Dravidian and Elamite would kind of upend most perceived ideas in India about Dravidian versus Indo-European languages (namely, that Dravidian ones are more indigenous than Indo-European). Also, this is very likely just a coincidence, but I realized that the Tamil word for homeland…

I thought that Southworth and McAlpin were kind of out there on their own with this hypothesis.

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#87

Post by guruparan18 »

Onewildgamer wrote: post #70

I come from a Sourashtra speaking community. We’re a small bunch of people immigrated from Gujarat to Southern parts in different waves during the Middle Ages, mostly because of war and trade. Our language has been preserved though the common speak and has no agreed upon script, so it is majorly taught to the children by their parents and relatives. Most of us know Tamil/Kannada/Telugu because of the main language in…

I have many friends who speak Sourashtra. It is always exciting and interesting to see how much they love their language and want to keep it in day-today interaction in house hold. I think any language that is spoken in kitchen and in dining table will survive long. Sourashtra will to!

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#88

Post by bodhiandpysics1 »

iguy wrote: post #61
srtjstjsj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yiddish is written in both hebrew letters and latin letters, but is one language. Language speakers don't care too much about the script when evolving their language; they use what they have.

I think Hindi/Urdu is quite a bit like Serbian/Croatian. The preferred script followed the religious divide, but (if I understand right) both sort-of standardised quite similar dialects out of a range of possibilities. And then later they were politically divided, and there were some efforts to move the official vocabulary away from each other's. IIRC Sanskrit has also been written in dozens of scripts, there's a per…

Since all indian scripts besides the Urdu Nastaliq were originally developed to write sanskrit, the transliteration is indeed perfect!

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#89

Post by bodhiandpysics1 »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #56
Arnavion wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would make Hindi and Urdu dialects of each other. I'm not saying this is necessarily right or wrong; it's a landmine I don't want to touch :)

Why is it a landmine? I am an Urdu speaker, and totally fine with realizing that Urdu is the Persianised standard register of the Hindustani language, and Hindi is the standardised and Sanskritised register of the Hindustani language.

There is some issue with priority... modern Shudh Hindi (the standard literary dialect) only dates from the 19th century when it was essentially invented by a number of Hindu intellectuals mostly in Benares. Urdu is older, along with the lovely Hindi dialect Braj Bhasha (both dating from the mid 16th century onward). The earliest Hindavi writing is Kabir, from the the 13th century. Also, Panjabi is a complex relation, since it's also the same language, filtered through the gilded pen of Guru Nanak.

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#90

Post by klyrs »

yumraj wrote: post #7
john4532452 wrote: post #4

There is a widespread misconception about India's National language as being Hindi. Article 343 of the Constitution prescribes Hindi as written in Devanagari script as the official language of the government along with English. The Constitution, however, did not declare Hindi as the national language or any other language. Hindi does not have any special privilege than any other state languages like Tamil, Telugu, Ma…

> The politics behind promoting Hindi is a religious one. It makes convenient to promote the varna system(modern caste system). This is the reason the religious party and organizations(BJP, RSS) promotes Hindi and forces in to the education of all non-hindi speaking states too. Rest of your comment is factual, except not sure if Tamil is the oldest language or Sanskrit or some other is. But the above quoted part of y…

> Why should the lingua franca of any country be a foreign language, it should be a local language

Hear, hear. But good luck convincing Americans to learn the local indigenous languages or go back where they came from...

Post reply on HN