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The New Wave of Indian Type

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Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#91

Post by vinayms »

nkoren wrote: post #18

> 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 identify in a later post) of Indian descent and whether you made that claim based on reading about Indian languages or by interacting with locals and asking them if they spoke languages or dialects. You see, almost all Indian languages (AFAIK) lack words to distinguish the concept of language and dialect. For academics sake, linguists do use some words but they haven't trickled down to general public. The tendency is to use the word 'bhasha' (or its variations such as bhashe, basai etc), which just means 'language', for both language and dialect, and even for such ideas as register and slang. So, any claim made by the general public about they speaking a different 'bhashe' must be evaluated properly and not taken at face value.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#92

Post by ivm »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #50
nkoren wrote: post #18

> 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…

Why fetishize diversity for its own sake, especially when it's a barrier to communication? I think we should all speak one language (preferably, the one we're speaking now). The information suddenly marketable to or directly consumable by anyone at any given place will significantly increase.

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.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#93

Post by jogjayr »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #50
nkoren wrote: post #18

> 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…

Why fetishize diversity for its own sake, especially when it's a barrier to communication? I think we should all speak one language (preferably, the one we're speaking now). The information suddenly marketable to or directly consumable by anyone at any given place will significantly increase.

> I think we should all speak one language (preferably, the one we're speaking now).

Gods no. You'll have to pry my other two languages from my cold, dead tongue. Just the ability to have private conversations in public feels like a superpower. The amazing puns you can make up is also a huge benefit - I can amuse myself all the time.

Plus, you know, cultural diversity, accessing millennia of literature and history etc. But that's the boring stuff /s

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#95

Post by [deleted] »

vvillena wrote: post #52
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why fetishize diversity for its own sake, especially when it's a barrier to communication? I think we should all speak one language (preferably, the one we're speaking now). The information suddenly marketable to or directly consumable by anyone at any given place will significantly increase.

The moment that happens, that language would start diverging again. You have to unify culture in order to unify language, and that doesn't sound as good anymore. Settling on a "common" or "business" language, though, is entirely possible, and has been done many times in history. No language ever encompassed the whole world, and if one language has it's English, right now. Latin, Arabic, Mandarin, French, English, Spa…

[deleted]

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#96

Post by tensor_rank_0 »

jogjayr wrote: post #93
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why fetishize diversity for its own sake, especially when it's a barrier to communication? I think we should all speak one language (preferably, the one we're speaking now). The information suddenly marketable to or directly consumable by anyone at any given place will significantly increase.

> I think we should all speak one language (preferably, the one we're speaking now). Gods no. You'll have to pry my other two languages from my cold, dead tongue. Just the ability to have private conversations in public feels like a superpower. The amazing puns you can make up is also a huge benefit - I can amuse myself all the time. Plus, you know, cultural diversity, accessing millennia of literature and history et…

sprechen se habla?

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#97

Post by splintercell »

sg0 wrote: post #76

I admit that despite of the ubiquity of Indian fonts these days, I still use English to write messages conveying Bengali/Hindi words, because I'm more comfortable that way. I don't remember the last time I wrote a letter in Bengali/Bangla or Hindi, and when it comes to electronic communication, it has always been English for me. So it feels strange for me to start writing in Bengali using my keypad all of a sudden.

I absolutely hate using latin script to write Hindi or to read it. I always use either the transliteration keyboard or google's absolutely amazing text-to-speech.

I also believe that google's text to speech is more 'easy' for Hindi than for English. There is rarely an ambiguity in Hindi text-to-speech than in English text-to-speech. For instance, in English it would write the pun equivalent text "Crypto current seas", and later correct it to "cryptocurrencies" once it has more context, but this is rarely needed in Hindi.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#98

Post by moultano »

nkoren wrote: post #47
allpratik wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, I am trying my luck in NLP with some Indian languages like Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and Tamil. The sheer number of dialects is driving me nuts. Even dialects have very different sounding words or pronunciations which increases the complexity exponentially. But I am trying it only with an eye on its potential. NLP will simply act as the catalyst for technology adoption in the rural and semi-rural area. I'm…

How does phonological complexity affect these things? I'm not a linguist, but Hindi at least seems way complex, with a much larger phoneme inventory than other languages I've studied.

I don't think Hindi's phonology is more complex than English, but it is all explicit in the character set rather than implicit in the etymology. (The voicing difference between "this" and "thistle" is my favorite example of this, even beyond the fact that we're representing one of the most common consonant sounds in the language with two characters.)

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#99

Post by carbolite103 »

sg0 wrote: post #76

I admit that despite of the ubiquity of Indian fonts these days, I still use English to write messages conveying Bengali/Hindi words, because I'm more comfortable that way. I don't remember the last time I wrote a letter in Bengali/Bangla or Hindi, and when it comes to electronic communication, it has always been English for me. So it feels strange for me to start writing in Bengali using my keypad all of a sudden.

I feel like there's certainly room to grow as far as input devices for Indian scripts. I learnt to type Devanagari on the InScript keyboard, though I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand it is laid out logically with voiced and unvoiced consonants each in their own rows, vowels are neatly placed on one side, the semivowels have their corner, etc, etc. It just gets annoying when switching back and forth between InScript and Latin QWERTY though (at least क-->k?). I think an input technique based around a mixture of a keypad and gestures would be interesting to try on a touchscreen. hmm...

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#100

Post by krapht »

baobrain wrote: post #78
jacobolus wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These mostly get called “dialects” for political reasons: the Chinese government doesn’t want to acknowledge that they are separate mutually unintelligible languages. Media in Chinese languages other than Mandarin is restricted, children are forced to use Mandarin in school, all official business is done in Mandarin, etc. There is a concerted effort to make other languages economically unviable, and generally to dise…

> the Chinese government doesn’t want to acknowledge that they are separate mutually unintelligible languages. Except they are not mutually unintelligible. Put someone from heilongjiang province in Sichuan and they will still be able to understand the language, albeit with more difficulty. Though there are dialects that do have completely different pronunciation, they all use the same underlying script , save a selec…

Are you a native speaker? Because 廣東話 and 閩南話 are totally unintelligible to me, and I want your language superpower.
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