Hindee seekhie!

[muckefuck]

Thanks to 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.

Comments

[wwidsith.livejournal.com]

Hell, I'm in. I am reading a load of Kipling at the moment, and half the Anglo-Indian slang is from Hindi so I kind of want to trace it back a little better. Any good resources online? I don't really have any Hindi books I don't think..

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

So far, this is the only one I've found that looks decent: http://www.unilang.org/course.php?res=69. It begins with instruction in Devanagari, but romanisation is used throughout so you can also skip that bit.

[wwidsith.livejournal.com]

I'M THERE. Although I'm gonna make an effort with the Deva as well, I've been waiting for an excuse to work it out.

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

and I can't make heads or tails of Devanagari

Oh come on -- Devanagari is EASY!! :: chuckle :: The only thing that I could see being a true sticking point, would be the consonant conjuncts.

You realize, if you're going to learn Hindi, that you'll need to learn Devanagari eventually, ne? I think it's worth it to learn, especially since SEVERAL languages use the script, even ignoring Sanskrit. I personally find it beautiful and (fairly) logical.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Why? After all, most native speakers of Hindi don't know Devanagari.

Anything is easy if you're interested in it. That's why I can read Chinese more easily than I can Persian.

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Why? After all, most native speakers of Hindi don't know Devanagari.

That's some poor reasoning -- "The language has lots of illiterate people, so why bother??" There's still a large body of literature there that's inaccessible if you don't learn to read (in addition to, again, being able to branch out to other language that USE the script, INCLUDING Sanskrit). Indeed, about 60% of people who speak Hindi are illiterate, but there's still a good 40% who read and write in Devanagari on a daily basis.

And really, since when have YOU, of all people, done what everyone else does? Some of your choices for your vocabulary segments, for example, prove just that. The same "most people" argument can then be applied to, say, learning Irish too, since most native Irish don't speak the language either.

And that's the other thing that I can't quite grock -- please, explain to me how you can be so set against learning scripts (remember the whole Colloquial Amharic/transliteration dealy???) yet put forth the effort to learn one of the most complex writing systems in the modern world?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Who says I want to read Hindi literature? You don't need a script to understand what Lata Mangeshkar is singing!

Also, I'm not "set against learning scripts". I still keep trying to master kana and for a while I was trying to learn Thai script. And as for Amharic, just today I cataloged a book in it.

But why on earth do you keep trying to flog Sanskrit at me? What would I ever want to read in the language that I couldn't find in scholarly transliteration?

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

:: laugh :: I guess I was just amazed at how badly you seemed to NOT want to learn the script! And after this and how you reacted to Colloquial Amharic -- can you honestly blame me for thinking that you seem set against it?

Also, with the conversations we've had about Hindi, I was sure you already knew it...!

What's wrong with Sanskrit? Especially with your interest in etymology, with the Sanskrit-ization of the Hindi language, and with the large body of literature IN the langauge (granted, most of it is on Buddhism, but still...!), I would think this would pose SOME interest.

Seriously, learning to speak and not read -- to ME -- seems "off-kilter". I feel like I'm not learning a good CHUNK of the language by not learning to read/write, just as I would the other way around (like how my Basque studies suffer because I can read it but I have next to no speaking ability or oral comprehension!).

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

If linguistics is your field, you get to hear a lot about Sanskrit. The early Indo-Europeanists were just gaga for it, and I've never thought it was all that and a fresh hot naan. Most of the Buddhist scriptures I'm interested in survive only in Chinese translation anyway, the Sanskrit originals having been lost aeons ago.

All that time I spent learning Tibetan script and Gurmukhi and I get no credit from you for it! *sob*

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

All that time I spent learning Tibetan script and Gurmukhi and I get no credit from you for it! *sob*

You never MENTION the Tibetan script, or if you have it's drowned in a sea of posts in Welsh and Irish. :: laugh ::

And I knew about Gurmukhi (your last Ursavision entry showed that) , but it too was a reason I thought you already knew Devanagari. After all, Gurmukhi is Devanagari lite. :: chuckle :: ^o^

I've never thought it was all that

So I take it you're equally as "blah" about languages that Indo-Europeanists go just as gaga for? Like Lithuanian?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It's like you said: I don't do what everybody else does. I actually had to do a phonological analysis of Lithuanian in college. It was fine, but it didn't leave me with a love of the language or anything. As you know, it takes more than just a complicated morphology to catch my interest.

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

If it helps, I've had no interest in Lithuanian either. Rather, nothing has made me want to learn it -- I had no catalyst (like you and Hindi/Bollywood). Sure, it's the oldest existing Indo-European language, but what after that???

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

By definition, no existing Indo-European language is older than any other. So it's not even special in that regard.

[caprinus.livejournal.com]

Yay, Lata Mangeshkar! <3

Just posting to say you totally get kudos for Gurmukhi from me -- and looking at them side by side, I don't think I would ever want to learn both. It would get so confusing.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Why? After all, most native speakers of Hindi don't know Devanagari.

I'm thinking I should continue trying to slog through it, for now. The main advantage I think is that it will force me to pay attention to the differences between aspirated vs. non-aspirated vs. dental vs. retroflex proununciations of what to me are the same consonants, since they're all represented by different written symbols. I'm guessing it's going to matter a lot because there are probably lots of words that are identical to each other except for variations in how the consonants are pronounced? And that I can't get away with slacking off on a precise grasp of pronunciation in Hindi like I could in French? It's a real weak spot for me, I'm not very good at distinguishing little differences in pronunciation, I'm a visual rather than aural learner. So I'm hoping having a written representation of each sound in my mind will help me discern and retain the distinctions.

Or that's the theory anyway. I'm having trouble even following Snell's transliteration system, which is pretty different from the one (or ones, I don't think it's very consistent out on the interwebs) I'm used to seeing. Like I think his "a as in alive" sounds exactly the same as his "a" with a bar over it, "as in palm". I presume he's using standard phonetic symbols? Is there a good "phonetic symbols for dummies" guide online somewhere, with more examples of different sounds?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I'll track down the book and have a look, but I assume he's using IAST, which seems to be the de facto academic standard. (It's the basis for the ALA-LC standard, for instance.) The symbols used are close to IPA, but not a perfect match. The "a in alive" is a shwa (IPA [ə]) whereas his "a in palm" is a low central vowel (IPA [a]) which speakers of Received Pronunciation generally use where we Midland speakers have IPA [æ]. You also hear it in Chicago accents in place of IPA [ɑ] (as in "father"). It's close enough to [ɑ] that you can just use this instead.

Hindi has a nice symmetrical vowel system: ten vowels, half tense and half lax. The lax ones are like English "short vowels" (except that a is really a shwa) and the tense ones are like English "long vowels" except they're not diphthongised. That is, what we're used to thinking of as "long a" is really [eɪ], or "é" as in French with a little "short i" sound attached to it at the end. Hindi "e" is a pure sound like in French or Spanish.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

I removed that comment because I figured if I'm going to reveal my ignorance in any way other than directly, while asking for information, well, I have my own lj for that. Thanks for the non-humiliating response.

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

I think moving between Roman and Cyrillic would not be so bad. It would just take practice. Arabic script vs. Devanagari would be harder.

But what do I know? This is just my uninformed opinion.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Harder in some ways, easier in others, I would think. Despite two decades of familiarity with Cyrillic, I still sometimes write "Р" when I mean "П" and "В" when I want "Б".