Talk: Hindi
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How about spanish? I thought it was more spread than english, thus english should come later ...
I removed a line about "reading and writing", because India has 65% literacy, and it is even lower in the Hindi-speaking region. Therefore I'm sure the number of readers/writers of hindi is lower than 600 million.
"About 600 million people speak Hindi, in India and abroad, and the total number of people who can understand the language exceeds 1.3 billion"
I believe both figures would be considerably inflated, and only arrived at by including related languages under Hindi, and expanding the definition of the word "understanding". Perhaps 400m and 800m would be more meaningful figures. Imc 12:35, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
According to "Ethnologue" the numbers are 180m and almost 500m. I aggree with imc and will cange the numbers to 400m and 800m (even considerably more than "Ethnologue" indicates).
Are you sure Hindi is not the UK`s 2nd language? My source was the The Independent, but of course journalists aren`t always correct.I would be grateful to know what is ? Andycjp 20/5/04
- Hindi would probably be the UK's second language only if you used a wide definition, that included Punjabi and Urdu speakers with it. This definition would probably not be acceptable to speakers of these languages. Imc 17:41, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)
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hindi = urdu?
Is it really true that linguists consider Hindi and Urdu the same language? Indian people that I know do not. In fact, i have been told that Urdu and Hindi are not mutually intelligible, which suggests to me that they should be considered distinct languages, even by linguists...
- As I understand it, they're regarded as recently diverged dialects. I wouldn't know about the mutual intelligibility issue, but I am pretty sure that the divergences are questions of script and vocabulary, both of which are rather minor, from the linguist's standpoint. But there are many ways that a linguist's understanding of a language differs from a common speaker's understanding. For example, a person who only knows standard English might encounter difficulty communicating with a person using African-American Vernacular English, despite the two being obviously dialects of the same language, and the standard English speaker might think the AAVE user "incorrect", while few knowledgeable linguists would be willing to assign that sort of value to a dialectical difference. -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 06:54, 4 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Hindi and Urdu, although very similar at a conversational level become completely different at a technical level. Urdu draws almost all of its new words from Persian and Arabic; and Hindi from Sanskrit. Even at a conversational level, there are often at least two words which can be used to say the same thing - one Persian- or Arabic-derived and one Sanskrit-derived. More recently there has been a move towards speaking purer Urdu in Pakistan and purer Hindi in India Bish 16:13, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Grammar & Orthography
It's unfortunate that nothing at all is said about either the grammar or the orthography of Hindi (other than which script it uses).
- A page on Hindi grammar would be nice. And then sanskrit grammar.
I have a spelling-related question which may get things kicked off:
- On Wiktionary we have now two spellings for the Hindi translation of the English word "French". Which of these two are right? Could they both be right?
- for many nationalities, there are two acceptable variants. I'm not sure that this is the case with French, but it may be.
Are the virama and candrabindu optional in Devanagari or just Hindi's use of it? Here are how the two spellings work:
- When writing a ?-conjunct, you can use either a ? or a (candra)bindu. the choice is yours. when denoting nasalized vowels, the bindu is obligatory. you only use the virama in hindi if, for some reason, you don't want to write a conjunct.
- फानिसिस
- pa aa na i ra i ra
- what you have written here is: phaanisis
- फ़्राँसीसी
- fa virama ra aa candrabindu sa ii sa ii
- Due to browser, font, or OS rendering support, the devanagari may not be rendered correctly. This is why I have spelled out the characters as well. — Hippietrail 00:53, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I am absolutely certain that फ़्राँसीसी is the right spelling. Beside the fact that I speak fluently hindi, I got this from the Dictionnaire Hindi-Français de Federica Boschetti, Editions du Mark. Yann 19:37, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- I am also absolutely certain. I checked in the Oxford Hindi-English dictionary, along with my college Hindi textbook. Oxford Hindi-English dictionary agrees that फ़्रांसीसी is hindi for french. And my textbook agrees that bindu only is used for nasal conjuncts, rather than candrabindu. Maybe we can find some third parties to settle the dispute? -Lethe | Talk
- I just wanted to mention Google hits for the various spellings. For our old spelling there are a few hits but all seem to be mirrors of the Wiktionary article. The spelling with candrabindu gets no hits. The spelling with just bindu gets 281 hits on real Hindi pages. — Hippietrail 00:59, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Yes - Hindi and Urdu are the same languages
Hindi and Urdu are just slighty different variants of each other. For example, if a person goes to a shop and asks for something, just talks in general to the next fellow, or even speak up a formal report without going into technical, political or religious aspects - you say EXCATLY the same thing in Hindi and Urdu. Day to day conversation is ABSOLUTELY intelligible - rather, identical. Narrow minded polititians and communal minded Hindus and Muslims, of course, don't know this in India. -Saumya Ranjan Dept of Chemical Engg. IIT Bombay
Sound system
I started adding a section on the sound system. It's getting much too long. I'm having trouble figuring out what the right level of detail is.
What I think is most important is to list the sounds, and then describe what is special about the Hindi phoneme repertoine from the point of view of an English speaker.
Listing is easy in principle, but I think it should be done in IPA, and I just don't have my IPA-editing act together.
The important features of the Hindi system that I can think of are:
- Four-way opposition in oral stops, with voice and aspiration acting independently
- Presence of the retroflex series
- Almost-predictable syncopation of schwa (short a)
What would you want to know about the sounds of Hindi if you were learning about the language for the first time?
ACW 22:46, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)
