Linguistics

I ended up writing this post after coming across Indian ethnicity folks who grew outside India, knew Hindi, and wanted to read/write Devanagari, the standard script for writing Hindi. One advantage which Hindi has over English is that spellings and pronunciations map one-to-one. As an example, the “u” in “but” and “put” is pronounced differently in English. This never happens in Hindi. Now, coming to the writing part. Compared to say, English, or even Spanish, the system is a bit involved. Primarily, there is a concept of vyanjana(व्यंजन), which are similar to alphabets in English and modifiers like Maatraa(मात्रा) and some other characters. Maatraa approximately maps to vowels while vyanjana maps to consonants. For Devanagari-based languages like Hindi and Sanskrit. You read them left to right and top to bottom. The “top to bottom” might sound a little confusing. Still, we will see how it plays a vital role in reading a maatraa (modifier).

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. However, this does show up in various spoken words like रहना, कहना, and सहन. And the native speakers intuitively know that the pronunciations deviate from the written spelling in these cases. ...

Modern day United States is weirdly mono-lingual

The name “Chavez” has three syllables. And is pronounced in 5 different ways!

Every resource that I came across tries to teach Spanish to English speakers. Those who already know Hindi/Devanagari have certain advantages. Both in terms of producing the correct Spanish pronunciation as well as being able to read/speak the Spanish language. Like Hindi, Spanish is much more phonetic and rule-based than English.

About 50% of Indians use Hindi as their primary language. Hindi/Devanagari is fairly phonetic except when it starts to import foreign words. And that’s why many Indians, with Hindi as their primary language, end up with incorrect pronunciations of foreign, mainly English, words. Let’s look at a few specific categories of mistakes.

why do indians use w and v interchangeably

The ultimate guide for native Hindi speakers to learn Gurmukhi (Punjabi) script