Earlier quoted context omitted.
> majority of India can't even read or speak english, how will they type in English? They won't. They type in Hindi, using the roman alphabet. Big difference. If anything, the roman alphabet is simpler than the syllable based Devanagari. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari Apparently SMS is big in India: > SMS is hugely popular in India, where youngsters often exchange lots of text messages, and companies provid…
> They type in Hindi Not sure the majority of Indians speak Hindi either.
Does India need its own vernacular internet?
31–40 of 53 posts
Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This might still become 500 million is a decade but still half the country is being denied of internet. Perhaps, but to paraphrase a comment in the attached thread, I'd be more worried about feeding the cow before milking it. I mean, for a linguistic population comparable to native English speaking population of the entire world, there exists not a single school teaching Engineering of Medicine in Hindi (not to spe…
Completely agree with you on this one. The situation is much more worse than what we living in a bubble imagine. The video really touches your heart. Reminds me of a couple of my friends in my college, and the struggle they went through - Shifting from one language to another.
The bubble thing is very real.
Isn't it interesting then that all our intelligensia is engaged in the whole apochryphal "caste-system" narrative [1] [2], while essentially being the gate keepers of a state/violence sanctioned system of linguistic apartheid ?
Even Chomsky, when questioned about his accomplice Roy, seemed perfectly okay with the current state of things. My entire schooling/conditioning has been turned on its head - I can't recommend S N Balagangadhara & Dharampal's works enough.
[1] http://www.hipkapi.com/2011/04/02/mantras-of-anti-brahmanism...
[2] https://archive.org/details/DharampalCollectedWritingsIn5Vol...
Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?
#33Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree to the first point you mentioned. In certain utility apps like payments etc this would hold true. In an internet without words i.e. images and video that would be true as well. But currently a large part of internet we use is text. Case in point, this article itself and this discussion. With the current technologies we have, for most part of Hindi speaking users, it is easy to speak in Hindi but very difficul…
> majority of India can't even read or speak english, how will they type in English? They won't. They type in Hindi, using the roman alphabet. Big difference. If anything, the roman alphabet is simpler than the syllable based Devanagari. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari Apparently SMS is big in India: > SMS is hugely popular in India, where youngsters often exchange lots of text messages, and companies provid…
Is the roman alphabet actually simpler? In some sense it is, but that's partly because it obscures a lot of detail that Devanagari captures.
For example, consider the name "Poisson". One one occasion I repeatedly tried to communicate it it's pronunciation in English, but failed. Then I wrote "प्वसैं" and my friend totally understood it.
In spite of speaking virtually no Hindi, I find it far easier to express various phonetic words in Devanagari than in Roman letters. And as far as learning pronunciation, it's virtually impossible learning Hindi correctly from Roman letter transliteration.
In my view as a native English speaker, Devanagari is a much better alphabet than the Roman one.
Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?
#35In India, the state is simply lazy. All most all English words should have an equivalent in all native languages. But, unfortunately no one forms any new words. If apps can be fully translated to the local languages, it will help everyone.
I don't think its the responsibility of the state. It is of the startups to move out of their english speaking bubble and realise the potential of non-english speaking india.
Buying power is largely concentrated with the English speaking though, even if it isn't their first language. Most people who do not speak English are also lower on the income scale. As in less than $500 per month in income
Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?
#36Cash transactions provide Privacy/Security; Govt must give Gun-Licenses to Common man if it really wants a Cashless society; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_c...
Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> majority of India can't even read or speak english, how will they type in English? They won't. They type in Hindi, using the roman alphabet. Big difference. If anything, the roman alphabet is simpler than the syllable based Devanagari. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari Apparently SMS is big in India: > SMS is hugely popular in India, where youngsters often exchange lots of text messages, and companies provid…
Is the roman alphabet actually simpler? In some sense it is, but that's partly because it obscures a lot of detail that Devanagari captures. For example, consider the name "Poisson". One one occasion I repeatedly tried to communicate it it's pronunciation in English, but failed. Then I wrote "प्वसैं" and my friend totally understood it. In spite of speaking virtually no Hindi, I find it far easier to express various…
I'm not sure you're really comparing qualities of alphabets here.
Whether there is a good phonetic correspondence between phonemes and written syllables is independent of the alphabet.
If you read German or Italian, the correspondence is close to perfect. In English or in French, it's awful.
It's possible that there is a better phonetic correspondence between Hindi phonemes represented by Devanagari characters and French phonemes (in the case of "Poisson") than with English phonemes represented with roman characters (e.g. no satisfactory transcription for the French "on"), but that's unrelated to the alphabets.
If you were talking to people who could read French, you'd show them "Poisson", and they'd pronounce it perfectly. It just so happens that English speakers pronounce "on" a different way.
Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> majority of India can't even read or speak english, how will they type in English? They won't. They type in Hindi, using the roman alphabet. Big difference. If anything, the roman alphabet is simpler than the syllable based Devanagari. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari Apparently SMS is big in India: > SMS is hugely popular in India, where youngsters often exchange lots of text messages, and companies provid…
> If anything, the roman alphabet is simpler than the syllable based Devanagari. Sure, until you need to figure out which of the four phonemes a letter corresponds to which is very difficult for foreign language learners of Hindi, as it can be for English. I am a native English speaker but I picked up Devanagari in a day or so because it's actually relatively consistent due to the phonetic syllabic nature.
But that problem is entirely due to English, not the roman alphabet. Same in French. No such problem in German or Italian.
Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree to the first point you mentioned. In certain utility apps like payments etc this would hold true. In an internet without words i.e. images and video that would be true as well. But currently a large part of internet we use is text. Case in point, this article itself and this discussion. With the current technologies we have, for most part of Hindi speaking users, it is easy to speak in Hindi but very difficul…
> majority of India can't even read or speak english, how will they type in English? They won't. They type in Hindi, using the roman alphabet. Big difference. If anything, the roman alphabet is simpler than the syllable based Devanagari. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari Apparently SMS is big in India: > SMS is hugely popular in India, where youngsters often exchange lots of text messages, and companies provid…
With the growing use of Whatsapp in India, SMS is actually quickly dying as a medium of communication between humans here. Poeple who have whatsapp (there's a lot of them in india) seem to use that to communicate instead of SMS (which is then used mostly for messages from companies, or stuff like 2-factor authentication etc).
Also, I see a lot of people use Whatapp to send/share actual hindi (written in devnagari) instead of hindi written in roman alphabet. I would say the latter is still more popular, but the former growing quite a lot.
Another thing I see is people use whatsapp to bypass typing altogether. Since you can share pretty much any media easily on whatsapp and other messaging serivices, I've seen some people leave short voice messages instead of typing text.
Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the roman alphabet actually simpler? In some sense it is, but that's partly because it obscures a lot of detail that Devanagari captures. For example, consider the name "Poisson". One one occasion I repeatedly tried to communicate it it's pronunciation in English, but failed. Then I wrote "प्वसैं" and my friend totally understood it. In spite of speaking virtually no Hindi, I find it far easier to express various…
I'm not sure you're really comparing qualities of alphabets here. Whether there is a good phonetic correspondence between phonemes and written syllables is independent of the alphabet. If you read German or Italian, the correspondence is close to perfect. In English or in French, it's awful. It's possible that there is a better phonetic correspondence between Hindi phonemes represented by Devanagari characters and Fr…
This is a good comment, but slightly complicated and took my a while to figure out what you were saying. I think your point is that he said "alphabet" but meant "language".
Basically, you can't really figure out English pronunciation from the way a word is written at all, because English isn't phonetic (e.g. Polish and polish, and many, many more).
For phonetic languages, the correlation between spelling and pronunciation is close to perfect (i.e. words are pronounced the way they are spelt [or spelled - wtf English]) - but only for the sounds in that language. Hence it may be possible to transliterate most English word to Devanagari. Most famously, e.g. English into Japanese doesn't work, even though Japanese itself is also phonetic but is e.g. missing the 'r' sound. The reverse is also true, unless you use extra punctuation to signify syllable boundaries or stress. E.g. Asakusa is 浅草 Asa-kusa and thus the stress changes and it's pronounced AsaKSA, not ASAkusa. I guess you could also transliterate it close enough with asaxa and people would probably get the stress right, further proof than English isn't the best tool for this.
(I think all the explanation of the previous paragraph is encompassed by "phonemes", which I had to google and still don't quite understand.)
The only "language" that can handle transliteration of any language is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which isn't a language because it doesn't have grammar or vocabulary or really anything except well-defined glyphs/symbols and the corresponding pronunciation.