Aur Hindi.

In a recent post, I mentioned that I've been teaching myself Hindi, and promised some examples of my Devanagari handwriting. 

[Edited to add: I caught the error in the first example below, and corrected it in a subsequent post.]

This says "mai(n) caarlaa hu(n)," or "I am carla." (The transliterations I supply are pretty much going to stink - there's no good, consistent way to transliterate Hindi using the Roman alphabet alone, so I'm kind of faking it.  The (n)'s represent nasalized vowels, rather than real nasal consonants.  "ai" is pronounced somewhere between the "ey" of "hey" and the "a" of "cat.")  Note the vertical bar at the end of the sentence, signifying a full stop.  The crescent-and-dot over the last word is the lovely candrabindu, which I mentioned in my previous post.  It nasalizes the vowel in the syllable it's drawn over - the vowel itself in that particular syllable is indicated by the little "u" mark under the letter "ha."  So "ha" + "u mark" + candrabindu = "hu(n)", which means "am."  See?

This example illustrates the kind of sentences one can construct after going through the first two chapters of an introductory language text.  It reads (again, apologies for the transliteration):  "kyaa ye shabdkosh mahange hai(n)?  ji nahi(n).  ye shabdkosh kaafi saste hai(n)."  Or, "Are these dictionaries expensive?  No.  These dictionaries are quite cheap."  There's a kind of universality to language instruction, so that these sentences just have the ring of beginners' foreign language instruction.  They are well-constructed and convey information, and yet no native speaker would ever utter them.

The dictionaries example also illustrates a few grammatical features of Hindi.  Verbs tend to come at the end of the sentence, as "hai(n)" above.  As in most (all?) Indo-European languages, nouns and adjectives undergo some inflection - not as much as, say, Latin with its proliferation of genders and cases and declensions, but more than English. In Hindi there are two grammatical genders and two cases.  Within each gender there are two subtypes of nouns, analogous to Latin's declensions.  One subtype is more or less fully inflected, while the other is almost uninflected.  "shabdkosh," dictionary, is an example of the latter.  In the sentences above, you have to use other plurality cues to tell that "shabdkosh" is plural, because the word does not inflect.  So:  "ye shabdkosh saste hai(n)" - these dictionaries are cheap - but "yah shabdkosh sasta hai" - this dictionary is cheap.

Finally, the example above illustrates a few of the conjuncts that I mentioned in my previous post - characters respresenting consonant clusters, comprising multiple characters smushed together. 

"kyaa," meaning "what" and also serving to make into a question a declaratory sentences that it introduces, features the conjunct "kya" as its initial character.  The conjunct is made up of the character "ka" with its right-hand tail cut off, jammed up against the character "ya."

"saste" also includes a conjunct, "sta," this time as its second character.  You can see how the first character, "sa," loses its vertical line when it joins up with "ta" to form "sta."  This is the sense in which many conjuncts are regular and therefore easy to learn and recognize: any character featuring a right-hand vertical line (and the majority of the consonants do) forms a conjunct in this way.  Note also the marking above the "sta" - that stroke curling up to the left - it indicates the vowel "e". 

That's all for now.  Next time, I'll talk more about the comparative grammars of Hindi and the other languages with which I am familiar. 

Comments

[आलोक कुमार]

आपकी लिखावट अच्छी है।
You can also write utf-8 encoded Hindi text -
http://devanaagarii.net

[carla]

Alok, thanks for the compliment to my handwriting! I wasn't sure if it was any good.