141–150 of 190 posts
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The written numerals are relatively recent, but the words for numbers are much older and still very similar across languages.
Wasn't Roman numerals in use, before the Indo-Arabic came to Europe? How come they are similar? They look worlds apart to me.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals
unus duo tres quattor quinque six septem octo novem decem ...
> The language and script change every five hundred miles Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. India is much more diverse than that. In my youth I spent some time bumming around Saurashtra, a region in Gujarat state that's about 150 miles square. Nearly 50 languages are indigenous…
> Nearly 50 languages are indigenous to that one region alone. Not dialects. Languages. I am a native Indian, born, raised and living there (I mean in India). I find it hard to process this claim. I am pretty sure there are about 10 languages in any fairly diverse region of the country, but beyond that what we find are mostly dialects of various languages. I am not sure if you are a 'western mind' (as you self identi…
Anyhow, for Saurashtra, I really did mean "language" and not "dialect". Honestly it's not a typical example of India, but is fun to use for dramatic effect. You know those 500 princely states that existed before unification? 200 of them were in Saurashtra (which is tiny). Politically, it was basically the India of India.
The linguistics seem to reflect that. At one point I recall finding myself in a tiny village somewhere near Dwarka where the residents spoke something completely baffling to me, with not a shred of English or Hindi or Gujarati in the mix. I was completely out of luck communicating with the locals, and had to rely on passing bus drivers for orientation. Later I read a book which said that there were a handful of tiny little Dravidian isolate languages scattered around Saurashtra; I must have stumbled across one of those. The claim of "50 languages" comes from that book, whatever it was. Feels about right, based on personal experience, but I can't really defend the claim beyond that.
(Also I should re-iterate that this was almost 20 years ago, and I very much doubt that there are any places so isolated today.)
1: Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India: 122 major languages and 1599 minor languages counted in the 2001 census.
> The language and script change every five hundred miles Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. India is much more diverse than that. In my youth I spent some time bumming around Saurashtra, a region in Gujarat state that's about 150 miles square. Nearly 50 languages are indigenous…
Just nitpicking, but the distinction is entirely political. In China, people speak Chinese dialects, that are much more diverse than the difference between the Danish language and the Swedish language.
Since China wants to look united, these are "dialects", while Denmark and Sweden wants to be separate sovereign nations they want to have distinct languages, so Danish and Swedish are not some Scandinavian dialects.
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No way, English is too dry and limiting due to the lack of emotional tones that are present at least in Spanish and Russian (because of the flexibility of words and their order in a sentence). I'm ok with using it for technical purposes but I would prefer something else to actually talk.
I think you are comparing with "business English" instead of actual locally spoken/written English here...
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Part of that is South India tends to be assertively anti-Hindi for various historical/cultural reasons. Given that, English is the only realistic option for communicating outside a given linguistic community.
>>Part of that is South India tends to be assertively anti-Hindi for various historical/cultural reasons. We are pro-OurLanguage, whatever that language. If that feels anti-Hindi to you, one can't help. You almost are suggesting to be pro-YourLanguage one has to throw out their their language.
For example, this is hardly "pro-OurLanguage" - http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/bangalore/karnataka-raks...
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> Nearly 50 languages are indigenous to that one region alone. Not dialects. Languages. I am a native Indian, born, raised and living there (I mean in India). I find it hard to process this claim. I am pretty sure there are about 10 languages in any fairly diverse region of the country, but beyond that what we find are mostly dialects of various languages. I am not sure if you are a 'western mind' (as you self identi…
>>I find it hard to process this claim. I think me means dialects. Which many times can sound very different. During my first semester engineering we had a electronics lecturer who came from North Karnataka. They speak a fairly different dialect of Kannada. When I heard her talking for the first time, I was quite startled to see that some thing like that would also mean Kannada. In Bangalore we have our typical stree…
As you might already know, the case with Kannada is more complex. Firstly, it has high amount of diglossia. Even with all the unnecessary, flowery Sanskrit loan words removed, the spoken form is greatly different from the written form. Next, the spoken language has many many regional variants, as with most languages in the world. Further, the spoken language varies according to social groups aka caste within the regions. One could even attempt to find variations based on economic status, aka rich to poor scale, but as an amateur linguist I don't find anything particularly noteworthy to hold such a classification, and, if anything, the variation is mostly confined to the tone of speech (not same as being tonal) and a bit of inflectional oddities rather than vocabulary. In modern times, the rich tend to use more English words which muddles the matter further. Beyond all this, there are about half a dozen languages that are identified as child languages of Kannada that are mostly associated with tribal groups living in forests and mountains. I guess this kind of diversity is expected of a language which is in continuous use for nearly two millennia.
For those intrigued and interested by this, I can't give any references on the internet beyond the wikipedia page because Kannada and Karnataka are severely underrated and underrepresented in Indian historical scene. Any work of worth written in English belong to the colonial times, with 1930s being the latest. The information in this post comes from knowledge acquired by reading books published, in Kannada, by language departments of universities of the state and the literary organization, and others are from personal experiences.
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When I looked into Esperanto a few years ago, I lost interest relatively quickly as I figured that this Euro-mashup of a language probably won't ever make it very far into areas where it would be most useful to me (i.e. outside of the Western world). Is this true, in your experience? Do you know of any Indian/African/Chinese Esperantists? Has Esperanto been a worthwhile investment of your time, and would you recommen…
I'd say it's been a worthwhile investment -- but not really on the merit of the community. That's probably my own fault: the community seems cool and I probably ought to be less of a hermit. There are certainly plenty of Chinese Esperantists; the China Radio International (the PRC's equivalent of Radio America, roughly) even has an Esperanto service that's pretty interesting to listen to[1]. What's really made it a w…
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> Nearly 50 languages are indigenous to that one region alone. Not dialects. Languages. I am a native Indian, born, raised and living there (I mean in India). I find it hard to process this claim. I am pretty sure there are about 10 languages in any fairly diverse region of the country, but beyond that what we find are mostly dialects of various languages. I am not sure if you are a 'western mind' (as you self identi…
>>I find it hard to process this claim. I think me means dialects. Which many times can sound very different. During my first semester engineering we had a electronics lecturer who came from North Karnataka. They speak a fairly different dialect of Kannada. When I heard her talking for the first time, I was quite startled to see that some thing like that would also mean Kannada. In Bangalore we have our typical stree…
It doesn't get more specific than that. He/she means languages