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Oct. 16th, 2008 12:52 pm
Hindee seekhie!
Thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mollpeartree's desire to learn enough Hindi to unlock the secrets of Bollywood, I've been inspired to dig out McGregor's Outline of Hindi grammar and try my hand at picking some up as well. I've been meaning for a while now to do something to shore up my shaky memory of the Panjabi I learned last year, and hopefully this project will reinforce that knowledge rather than overwriting it. wiped's on board, too, as long as we avoid Devanagari, which is fine with me. Any other volunteers to join our scrappy little band?
So far, I've been trying to write in the form of "Roman Urdu" that I recognise from movie titles and online fora. Incidentally, while looking for guides to this system, I stumbled upon an explanation of the ubiquity of Romanisation in Bollywood that had me slapping my head. They avoid Devanagari for the same reason that they avoid Standard Hindi in their dialogues, namely that they're seeking the widest possible market for their output. Pakistanis, as a rule, can't read any Indic scripts, but English is a required subject in school. So whereas "हम दिल दे चुके सनम" would be as much gobbledygook to them as it is to most of us, they will readily apprehend the meaning of "Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam".
Similarly, there's an appreciable number of Indians who speak Indo-Aryan languages close enough to Hindi that they can understand basic phrases but who won't know Devanagari because of the curious sociolinguistic trend of giving every major South Asian language its own alphabet. "Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam" would have almost the identical spoken form in Indian Panjabi (the major difference being the pronoun "aseeN" in place of "hum"), but "हम दिल दे चुके सनम" means nothing to someone familiar only with the Gurmukhi script, where this would be written "ਹਮ ਦਿਲ ਦੇ ਚੁਕੇ ਸਨਮ".
Confidential to RT: Yeah, "Roman" vs. "Cyrillic" is about accurate--and look how good English-speakers are at deciphering Cyrillic characters. I can read Gurmukhi with some difficulty, and I can't make heads or tails of Devanagari. Put them side-by-side like that, and the resemblances pop out, but just seeing न on its own, I wouldn't make the connexion to ਨ rather than, say, ਜ or ਸ.
mollpeartree's desire to learn enough Hindi to unlock the secrets of Bollywood, I've been inspired to dig out McGregor's Outline of Hindi grammar and try my hand at picking some up as well. I've been meaning for a while now to do something to shore up my shaky memory of the Panjabi I learned last year, and hopefully this project will reinforce that knowledge rather than overwriting it. wiped's on board, too, as long as we avoid Devanagari, which is fine with me. Any other volunteers to join our scrappy little band?So far, I've been trying to write in the form of "Roman Urdu" that I recognise from movie titles and online fora. Incidentally, while looking for guides to this system, I stumbled upon an explanation of the ubiquity of Romanisation in Bollywood that had me slapping my head. They avoid Devanagari for the same reason that they avoid Standard Hindi in their dialogues, namely that they're seeking the widest possible market for their output. Pakistanis, as a rule, can't read any Indic scripts, but English is a required subject in school. So whereas "हम दिल दे चुके सनम" would be as much gobbledygook to them as it is to most of us, they will readily apprehend the meaning of "Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam".
Similarly, there's an appreciable number of Indians who speak Indo-Aryan languages close enough to Hindi that they can understand basic phrases but who won't know Devanagari because of the curious sociolinguistic trend of giving every major South Asian language its own alphabet. "Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam" would have almost the identical spoken form in Indian Panjabi (the major difference being the pronoun "aseeN" in place of "hum"), but "हम दिल दे चुके सनम" means nothing to someone familiar only with the Gurmukhi script, where this would be written "ਹਮ ਦਿਲ ਦੇ ਚੁਕੇ ਸਨਮ".
Confidential to RT: Yeah, "Roman" vs. "Cyrillic" is about accurate--and look how good English-speakers are at deciphering Cyrillic characters. I can read Gurmukhi with some difficulty, and I can't make heads or tails of Devanagari. Put them side-by-side like that, and the resemblances pop out, but just seeing न on its own, I wouldn't make the connexion to ਨ rather than, say, ਜ or ਸ.