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Does India need its own vernacular internet?

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Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#41

Post by bandrami »

geon wrote: post #9
amitsy wrote: post #6

Earlier 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…

I have probably several thousand Whatsapp messages in Hindi typed phonetically in the Roman alphabet on my phone. Well, more honestly it's Hinglish, but still.

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#42

Post by geon »

davidivadavid wrote: post #38
vinay427 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Swedish has a few redundant "ch" sounds; k, sj, sch, skj and tj.

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#43

Post by yummyfajitas »

davidivadavid wrote: post #37
yummyfajitas wrote: post #34

Earlier 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…

From what little I've seen of French, the French person just knows how Poisson should be pronounced and does it.

This is even how most of english works. And there is actually a much better phonetic correspondence between Devanagari and English phonemes than between roman letters/letter pairs and English phonemes.

Consider "The" (as in the 3 letter word) vs "Theranos". The roman string "the" represents a different sound in both words. In Devanagari the two sounds are represented by "द" and "ये" (the letter is य means "tha" and the े changes the "a" to "e" as in "egg"), respectively, so you'd transliterate to द and येरनौस respectively. (A native speaker please correct me if I'm getting this wrong.)

It's possible that in German and Italian, the correspondence between letters and sounds is a lot better than in English. But from what I can tell, devanagari would make a more phonetic English alphabet than Roman letters do.

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#44

Post by davidivadavid »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #43
davidivadavid wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From what little I've seen of French, the French person just knows how Poisson should be pronounced and does it. This is even how most of english works. And there is actually a much better phonetic correspondence between Devanagari and English phonemes than between roman letters/letter pairs and English phonemes. Consider "The" (as in the 3 letter word) vs "Theranos". The roman string "the" represents a different sou…

English is notoriously awful when it comes to phoneme/grapheme correspondence (French is pretty close).

Essentially what you're saying is that Devanagari is superior because there's something closer to a phoneme/grapheme bijection. Which may or may not be true, even though it wouldn't surprise me (I don't know it at all, but I assume some English sounds aren't as trivial to transliterate).

But that's entirely orthogonal to the alphabet. In fact, you could perfectly map Devanagari (or IPA) to unambiguous roman syllables, so that the "Th" sound in "The" is written differently than the "Th" sound in "Theranos." It's just a matter of coding.

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#45

Post by yummyfajitas »

davidivadavid wrote: post #44
yummyfajitas wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what little I've seen of French, the French person just knows how Poisson should be pronounced and does it. This is even how most of english works. And there is actually a much better phonetic correspondence between Devanagari and English phonemes than between roman letters/letter pairs and English phonemes. Consider "The" (as in the 3 letter word) vs "Theranos". The roman string "the" represents a different sou…

English is notoriously awful when it comes to phoneme/grapheme correspondence (French is pretty close). Essentially what you're saying is that Devanagari is superior because there's something closer to a phoneme/grapheme bijection. Which may or may not be true, even though it wouldn't surprise me (I don't know it at all, but I assume some English sounds aren't as trivial to transliterate). But that's entirely orthogo…

Which may or may not be true, even though it wouldn't surprise me (I don't know it at all, but I assume some English sounds aren't as trivial to transliterate).

From what I can tell Hindi phonemes are a superset of English phonemes. I can't think of any that don't transliterate well, certainly not any common ones. I've been told by several native Hindi or Marathi speakers that they rarely run into a western phoneme that they can't already pronounce.

I agree that we could make a better roman-like alphabet. My only point is that Devanagari already seems to do a good job of this, and this may be why it seems a bit more complicated than Roman letters - it expresses things that Roman letters don't.

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#46

Post by saint_fiasco »

avemuri wrote: post #35
amitsy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The people who have the most purchasing power and speak English, are they bilingual or do they only speak English?

If not, could language be used as a tool for market segmentation? Give price-sensitive people lower prices to increase the size of the market without hurting the profits extracted from the wealthier people.

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#47

Post by saint_fiasco »

akashakya wrote: post #21
mido22 wrote: post #12

Am I the only Indian who thinks this is not such a bad thing, prefer one language to unite us all (isn't that the common base for most far-future novels?), don't care which, I can converse in three Indian languages, and know bit of french. In Sweden, all that knowledge is useless, all the main sites are in Swedish, now I am learning å,ö,ä, guess how much fun I am having?

> prefer one language to unite us all Its not a bad thing if that happens properly. But instead currently we have small number of 'elite' people who always prefer English over native language and we have large number of people we don't know how to read & write English. Since the output(business/knowledge/tech) of this 'elite' group almost always in English and by definition they are in control its not easy for person…

Why would they want to break the loop?

If one language to unite us all is a good thing, then either kids from rural backgrounds have to be taught English, or everyone has to learn the native language of that kid. This will be impossible for a kid from a different rural background. Worse than English, even, since most other languages don't have the same amount of cheap available learning materials.

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#48

Post by saint_fiasco »

The article says "88 percent of Indians can’t speak English (let alone read it)"

I'm not a native English speaker, but that sentence implies that reading English is more difficult than speaking it. But in my experience, most people who learn English as a second language learn to read first, especially if they specifically learn it to use the Internet.

For native English speakers: Is my interpretation of that phrase correct?

For non-native English speakers: Did you learn to read English first or did you start by learning to speak it? Does it vary on first language, literacy level, motivation?

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#49

Post by vinay427 »

davidivadavid wrote: post #38
vinay427 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You would need quite a few diacritics to map to all of the Hindi phonemes, especially including loanword phonemes (/z/, etc.) I'm not saying this is bad, but it's not the easy solution that it was made out to be. Meanwhile, Devanagari handles consonant and vowel phonemes quite consistently as others have pointed out.

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#50

Post by vinay427 »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #45
davidivadavid wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is notoriously awful when it comes to phoneme/grapheme correspondence (French is pretty close). Essentially what you're saying is that Devanagari is superior because there's something closer to a phoneme/grapheme bijection. Which may or may not be true, even though it wouldn't surprise me (I don't know it at all, but I assume some English sounds aren't as trivial to transliterate). But that's entirely orthogo…

Which may or may not be true, even though it wouldn't surprise me (I don't know it at all, but I assume some English sounds aren't as trivial to transliterate). From what I can tell Hindi phonemes are a superset of English phonemes. I can't think of any that don't transliterate well, certainly not any common ones. I've been told by several native Hindi or Marathi speakers that they rarely run into a western phoneme t…

> From what I can tell Hindi phonemes are a superset of English phonemes.

This isn't exactly correct. There are a variety of allophones that many Hindi-native speakers use in their English that aren't used by most native English speakers outside of India such as the retroflex t, trilled or flap r, and others. There are also others missing from Hindi entirely such as /ʒ/.

See phoneme tables for English and Hindi/Urdu (in IPA for instance) for more details.

I agree with your premise, in any case, that Devanagari describes far more than the English/Roman script.

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