Language isn’t just a means of communication but it is the medium of propagating culture. That’s why culturally Canada is similar to the USA while Mexico (and the rest of Latin America) to Spain. One huge advantage the USA has over Europe is that practically everyone speaks a single language. A Californian can fly 6 hours to New York City, and feel just at home, with the same language and thus, a similar culture.
While writing text in Hindi/Sanskrit (Devanagari script), I need a quick way to insert the Avagraha symbol(ऽ). It turns out there is an undocumented shortcut on the Mac Hindi QWERTY keyboard for that and that is _shift + _
There are at least three different ways “ch” gets pronounced in English words and that tells you the origin of those words.
English has a very commonly used vowel that doesn’t exist in Indic languages natively. It is ɛ- Open-mid front unrounded vowel. Consider the word bet, its vowel sound is halfway between bat/बैत़ and bait/बेत़. This vowel is fairly common in English, for example, tech whose vowel sound is halfway between tack and take. Or met which is half-way between mat and mate. Now, this sound is not natively written in Hindi....
Tharman, the 9th president of Singapore is of Indian Tamil ethnicity. The pronunciation of his first name shows how various languages use Latin alphabets.
I had just landed in the Czech Republic. I was taking a bus from Prague airport to the city. The man sitting next to me was dressed in formal. He was here to attend a meeting of the ESA, European Space Agency. I asked, “What language is the meeting in?”. “English”, he replied, nonchalantly.
Hindi and English have several similar yet distinct phonemes.
When Americans say spicy, they usually mean chili. For some weird reason, other spices that are more aromatic like Turmeric, cloves, cardamom, etc. do not seem to fit the definitely of “spicy”. That’s why in a typical Indian/Thai restaurant in the US when they ask how spicy, they mean “How much chili should I put in” However, when an Indian says that the spices were good, s/he usually means that the food had an aroma and a balanced composition of contrasting tastes....
The phonetics of German are relatively easy for more Hindi speakers except for a few sounds that are more nuanced.
Latin script is the most recognized script in the world today. Most Western European languages, including some widely spoken ones like English, Spanish, and French use the same script with minor differences. The pronunciation variation, however, is a different matter altogether. Nothing illustrates it better than the popular Spanish last name Chavez. The name has three syllables. And is pronounced in 5 different ways!