Wednesday, May 08, 2013

what a strange piece on dravidian languages!

this kannada gent is going off on odd tangents. and the fact is that southern languages have 1-1 correspondence with devanagari (*not* with hindi).

hindi is an awkward language, as it is essentially urdu written in devanagari (which is not an appropriate script for urdu -- devanagari is vowel rich, whereas arabic-derived languages are vowel-poor, and in old arabic, the vowels are often missing altogether. this is why you have this debate about whether it is actually 72 virgins or 72 white raisins -- the word is 'hr', and if you say it is 'houri' it is the virgins; if you put other vowels in there it is white raisins). the vowel-poverty is what makes hindi speakers do abrupt endings, eg bhim for bhima. this sounds very rough to a sanskrit (or south indian language) speaker.

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sent from samsung galaxy note, so please excuse brevity

2 comments:

Pagan said...

off topic:
In about 100 constituencies, Yeddyurappa's KJP and BSR Congress of B Sriramulu had chipped away BJP's votes in no small measure benefiting the Congress immensely.

Sujeev said...

The votes were there. The party wasn't.