131–140 of 286 posts
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the subtitles might have been a bit more necessary if all the on-screen text wasn't in english. That seemed like a strange choice for an ad produced by Google India.
The official languages of India are Hindi and English.
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Bang on! I don't think you are being cynical, you are being true! People across borders should stop being emotional over an advertisement by a multinational corporation. If they really have to become emotional, there is plenty of literature on this topic in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. And if they even want to take actions, there are many NGOs trying to ease up the visa procedure, raising awareness among the peopl…
Do you prefer the generic "people fiddling with their devices on a sunny day, female voice playing buzzword bingo in the background"? Props for Google for being ballsy. I also love how people throw in the "multinational" qualifier as if this makes a company that much more evil.
Furthermore, I don't see the parent use the word "evil" in his comment.
That said, when a multinational that ferrets around billions of dollars in revenue around the world through obscure countries to avoid paying significant taxes in any of the countries it operates it [0], suddenly attempts to portray itself as warm, fuzzy and a big proponent of India-Pakistan friendship, forgive me for taking them at a lot less than face value.
[0] http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/10/to-reduce-its-tax-bu...
Even if people want to come closer the state and politics always gets in the way.
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the subtitles might have been a bit more necessary if all the on-screen text wasn't in english. That seemed like a strange choice for an ad produced by Google India.
The official languages of India are Hindi and English.
Not sure about Urdu's status in Pakistan though.
As a fellow Indian, I just want to point out that this video and any other efforts to develop people-to-people relationships between India and Pakistan have zero effect on the ongoing conflicts between the nations. Indians love Pakistani singers, cricketers, food, their language(Weird, I'm not a native Hindi speaker. But people tell me that Pakistani's speak better Hindi than most Indians). I've heard from Pak friend…
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A side note: as a teenager I spent one summer working in a clothing store in London, with a bunch of Spaniards and Italians. They spoke to each other using their respective tongue, and said they could understand each other. Just basics of course. Maybe someone from Spain or Italy could chime in here?
As a French I can tell you we can understand most of casual Italian / Spanish conversation just fine (and I believe Spaniards and Italians can understand a good portion of French too). The roots are very similar for most words that you catch it up very quickly.
Emotional Marketing?
God bless Capitalism!
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A Yiddish scholar once said that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." It's really true. One might think that mutual intelligibility (ability for speakers of one to make themselves fully understood by speakers of the other) would be the standard for differentiating languages from dialects, but the distinction really ends up just being political. The spoken forms of Hindi and Urdu are entirely mutually in…
The same applies to the Scandinavian languages, to an extent. A Norwegian will generally have little issue understanding both Danish and Swedish, while Swedes and Danes have a much harder time understanding each other. However, us Norwegians receive a lot of influence from our neighbors and so understanding of their slight differences in language comes as a side-effect of that. A kind of younger sibling complex. May…
TO be fair Hindi, even though it grew more organically was given a formal status of national language by the predominantly Northern Indian Congress government post-independence to use it as an instrument to exert central political influence on the rest of the country, rather unfairly. At the time of India's independence, there were far more Tamil and Bengali speakers (not just native) than Hindi, but the central government forced Hindi to the rest of the country which did lead to a lot of understandable backlash, primarily in the South, which is why they dare not make it the official language of the country.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A side note: as a teenager I spent one summer working in a clothing store in London, with a bunch of Spaniards and Italians. They spoke to each other using their respective tongue, and said they could understand each other. Just basics of course. Maybe someone from Spain or Italy could chime in here?
As a French I can tell you we can understand most of casual Italian / Spanish conversation just fine (and I believe Spaniards and Italians can understand a good portion of French too). The roots are very similar for most words that you catch it up very quickly.
As a Romanian I understand best Italian, then Spanish, then French and lastly Portuguese which is little odd for me.