I don't care about emotionally manipulative film for its own sake. However, if this did actually do anything significant to improve Indian/Pakistani relations, I really would forgive Google for its asinine product design decisions for as much as half a year.
This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan
141–150 of 286 posts
Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 person currently studying Spanish, I can understand basic Portuguese, Italian, French.
As all these languages are from the same origin (Latin).
Similarly, although Hindi is derived from Sanskrit, over the years, due to lots of Mughal invasions, and Urdu arts, poets, a lot of Urdu words are a part of Hindi. Hence they are easily understood in either part of the border.
Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan
#143Earlier 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 with the Arabic and Chinese language families, different varieties of Romance languages are similar enough in syntax and vocabulary that speakers can kind of make themselves understood to each other if they speak slowly and choose their words carefully. Same with lots of closely related languages, e.g. German and Dutch. But they're not nearly mutually intelligible to the degree that American English and most varie…
I'm Romanian, as a kid in a few months I became fluent in Italian just from watching their TV channels, no dictionary involved. It was a mass phenomenon at the time since their TV channels were quite popular on cable.
Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan
#144This is a beautiful ad and will make you emotional. As a person of Indian background I was able to relate to it easily but I wonder what others think of it? Are you able to feel the strong emotions based on reading subtitles or does language hamper the feelings and it loses its impact. Kudos to the team involved in this and thanks for posting this.
Being of Pakistani background, I could relate to it a lot. I'm actually just stunned by how well done the ad is in every aspect. I find it a little strange that a big Internet company did this, one wouldn't have expected such a thing. The reaction from my Pakistani friends is overwhelmingly positive too by the way.
It's just marketing. Wonder how well it worked and if they saw an increase in sales. :-)
Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Urdu and Hindu are essentially the same thing -- except one is written in classic Indian devanagari Sanskrit-style script, and the other is written in Arabic script. And, of course, regional dialect -- but really, those distinctions are excusable in daily speaking. The related language families are just so related across the board -- Marathi, Punjabi, and Hindi -- that one can pick up the other with just a bit of pra…
What is generally spoken is a mix of Hindi and Urdu (Hindustani, as Mahatma Gandhi would have liked to call it). We rarely come across anyone speaking "Shuddh Hindi" or "Khalis Urdu" these days. English words permeate almost all regional languages. Dialogues of bollywood films used to have a fair sprinkling of Urdu words until late nineties. Film titles too used to be shown in three languages - Hindi, Urdu and Englis…
> English words permeate almost all regional languages.
I wonder if, with the growing global connectedness due to the invention of the internet, we'll see a convergence of all spoken languages over the next hundreds or thousands of years.
Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan
#146A Pakistani girl showed this video to me early this year, and she was in fact very moved.
The Pakistan - India divide is a tragedy of religion and politics, foreign and domestic.
Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Nordic languages and Hindu-Urdu are great examples of how political language is. The reason Urdu was made a separate language was because of political reasons of the Mughals. Similarly, I believe Norwegians gave a separate legal status to Norwegian to make it distinct from Danish, as a mark of defiance to Danish colonial rule of the past. TO be fair Hindi, even though it grew more organically was given a formal statu…
For what it's worth - the backlash is still kind of the case in the South (not speaking statistically, just from personal experience). I grew up around Mumbai and traveled to the southern part of the country 5 years ago where Hindi is not the native tongue.
Hindi was not particularly well-spoken nor was it always well-received by the other person. We wound up talking in English most of the time.
Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan
#148I hope this is still hacker news rather than some emotional fools forum who ignore realities.
Don't worry, I'm sure someone will come along to comment on the web design on some computer screen in the background. And that will be OK.
Better would be if someone discuss how we can bring up http://extendedsubset.com ;)
Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Nordic languages and Hindu-Urdu are great examples of how political language is. The reason Urdu was made a separate language was because of political reasons of the Mughals. Similarly, I believe Norwegians gave a separate legal status to Norwegian to make it distinct from Danish, as a mark of defiance to Danish colonial rule of the past. TO be fair Hindi, even though it grew more organically was given a formal statu…
'there were far more Tamil'
That is false. Citations please?
'and Bengali speakers'
This ignores the fact that Bengali attained its status because of British who ruled India from Calcutta and enabled Bengali hegemony. No native speakers learned Bengali as second language in rest of the undivided India. Only Bengali diaspora moved to different parts of country as part of British civil services.
'Hindi... 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'
Another propaganda. Hindi-Urdu (or Hindustani) was the most spoken and widely understood language in undivided India. Hindustani was official language of British. It might lose to Bengali IFF one divides it into Hindi and Urdu. But that division happened AFTER independence, when the spoken Hindi was standardized to a Sanskrit base, and Arabic-Persian words were mercilessly pruned-off to enable non-Hindustani speaking people to grasp it easily. The only people who got the short end of the deal were Tamil, because Tamil language has got almost (almost) nothing to do with Sanskrit.
To blame a newly formed government of an enslaved country, of 'exerting political influence' is the racist tirade Tamils latched on to, after there beloved masters left the country and didn't leave them in charge.
Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan
#150As 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…
You for got add your RAW and Indian army, mate.
Indian army and RAW are nowhere influential enough to be compared to Pak-army and ISI. India has done one good thing in establishing democracy - its political has curbed the military power from day 1 of independence. Unfortunately it is the opposite in Pakistan.