Watch those minimal pairs!

[muckefuck]

ਮੱਕੀ ਦੀ ਰੋਟੀ makkī dī roʈī "cornbread"
ਮੱਖੀ ਦੀ ਰੋਟੀ makkhī dī roʈī "housefly bread"

ਹਵਾਈ ਅੱਡਾ havāī aɖɖā "airport"
ਹਵਾਈ ਅੰਡਾ havāī aɳɖā "aerial egg"

The second pair is especially diabolical. If you look at the Panjabi Gurmukhī spelling, you'll see that the two compounds differ in a single diacritic: For "base", it's the bottom half of a tiny circle; for "egg", it's the top half.

Edit: Pedant that I am, I felt compelled to refine my sloppy usage here. Panjabi can be written in several scripts, including Shāhmukhī (Perso-Arabic) and Devanagari, in addition to the Gurmukhī which is official in the state of Punjab. I hope to do a future post on language variation, particularly divergences between the chief Pakistani and Indian varieties.

Comments

[keyne.livejournal.com]

Firefox handles most of your obscure languages just fine, but it throws up its hands on this one. All I see are question marks.

[bunj.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's because I just upgraded to 2.0, but my Firefox handles Panjabi just fine.

[keyne.livejournal.com]

I've been using FF 2.0 for a while, and OS X 10.4.8. Maybe you have system fonts installed which I don't?