Talk:Hindi

this article sucks big time! move it to wikipedia please - it's bull!

it's in my sandbox now. anyone wanting to "majorly" edit it, kindly leave me a note on my talk page. -- mowgli 20:05, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

So I have added a chapter about history, I want to rewrite the grammar part completely. I don't get what the present yap is all about.-- Swami A. Suresh 21:54, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Well , too late now. I just got impatient and rewrote it completely. -- Swami A. Suresh 22:19, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

good job! just noticed it. i'll add my two paise over the next two days. btw i've just added a "note" but i'm not comfortable with it being bang in the middle of the text nor at the bottom. wonder what the solution is? if you know how to create the wikipedia type foototes, i.e. the "hotlink" footnotes that look like [1] then maybe we could move it to the bottom of the page. -- mowgli 14:57, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

About History

Sanskrit evolved into the many verniculars. A conservative view on this would be "degenerated".

Later the persian (farsi is not an accepted term by everyone, but what the heck) influence in the vernicular (khari boli - meaning the "right speech") created the Hindustani, which later was "religionized" into Urdu and Hindi. That is what I have learned anyway.

Well - what to do about this? I want to give a sense of continous degeneration, speeded up by the mullahs and pundits attemps to purify the language. I also want to make a pun out of the notion that verniculars are "foul speech", while the Dehli vernucular khari boli literally means the "right speech". Some of this got lost in translation details by your many edits. Some of them added good jokes, others just blurred the context, to my opinion. I will try to restore the first two chapters to my original thought a bit later. But now first - sleeeeep!!!! -- Swami A. Suresh 22:43, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

• yo, yo, yo! khari boli does not meaneth "right speech." if it did, i'd have got your joke. let it be - don't revert to your version (it'll definitely escape those familiar with hindi - i dunno if non-hindians will get it). "khari boli" literally means court language or the tongue you use while standing (which you would before any royalty). it's etym is kharE from "standing"...? wikipedia describes wikipedia:khari boli literally as "standing tongue."

Here I stand to trial - and fail! There goes my univeristy education!!! Or at least - some of it's translation of the original textbooks! -- Swami A. Suresh 07:28, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

• sanskrit did not evolve/degenerate into many vernaculars. the many vernaculars were called the wikipedia:prakrits and evolved independently (or at least their evolution is still uncertain - so much so that prakrits and the dravidian languages may be having a greater affinity <-- just my conjecture to highlight the irony of your position). why it seems to us that sanskrit "evolved/degenerated" into the prakrits (like khari boli, braj bhasha and later hindi, bengali, gujrati et al) is because they all use the same devanagari script. in fact sanskrit and hindi grammar are poles apart (so what if they have a shared vocabulary). finally, it wasn't always like this. sanskrit was first written in wikipedia:kharoshti which is a right to left script (of semetic/persian origin most likely). see this indian stamp:

[panini is writing in kharoshti in it - is there a parody already here?]

• why panini (the sanskrit grammarian! the god himself!) wrote in kharoshti? 'cos devanagari wasn't around and kharoshti had trickled down the northwest. there are also buddhist texts in sanskrit written in kharoshti from that NWFP region. where did devanagari come from? ashoka introduced the first script/s to india, viz. wikipedia:brahmi. devanagari evolved from this. brahmi, scholars conjecture, is most likely of phoenician origin - perhaps a consequence of ashoka's intl. trade. with royal patronage, devanagari slowly supplanted all other scripts including kharoshti (panini did not live to see this!).
• go ahead make fun of all this now! bloody wannabe indians. :)-- mowgli 06:12, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

one more point:

• "vernaculars" as foul speech is a totally "colonial" context! that might be out of place here (we can debate this). "vernacular" from latin verna means "slaves" or the language of the slaves/natives. the brit. colonials brought it into common usage. "vernacular" language means a tongue "subaltern-ed" to the "colonial" tongue or "foul" to the colonial. it's the chokedar's language to use a wikipedia:Hobson-Jobson term (see dictionary.com for a definition of "chokedar"). usage of the word "vernacular" to refer to "indian languages" is frowned upon in india today - non pc. natives using "vernacular" to deride languages of fellow natives thus mimicking colonials in some slave mentality way? i dunno but it could be funny if done properly (i can't). -- mowgli 07:14, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Now here on the latter part we must become a little more clear about the linguistics. Some is knowned, other things is assumed. The longer down the timeline itself we goes, the more unsure things becomes.

Italian, french, spanish and romanian are all latin Wikipedia:vernaculars. Latin is the original language. The others has evolved through geographic separation and the test of time. Some of them has added a few elements from surrounding language elements, as in the case of romanian and the slavic languages. all have changed their grammar and a present day italian couldn't use the locative case even if he tried. (Wikipedia gives several definitions of the world though. I would never say that german was a vernacular of latin, not from a linguistic context. German is not low latin. But italian is. Foul and ugly latin. )

There were no original italian besides latin - it has all evolved. Or degenerated if you want to make a conservative pun out of it.

Are you saying that the aryan indian vernaculars, hindi, bengali and so on didn't evolve from sanskrit? That there were an original prakrit or an original bengali spoken by the aryan tribes besides sanskrit in vedic times? How come then that I haven't heard of it before? That would change the entire perception of the wikipedia:Indo-Aryan languages evolvement. 07:41, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

• Suresh, you've hit the nail on the head in your last para above (btw "vernicular" is a sp. typo, isn't it?). each and every word of that para ("aryan," "original prakrit," "aryan tribes," "vedic times," etc.) are extremely contentious words TODAY that will lead you to being punished with a 100 page long verbal diarrhea in response if posted in wikipedia or any of the serious SA history forums. your "history in C" is the indian secondary school textbook version that we are still taught today - this version is euro-centric and written by european scholars. the trouble with it, to put it crudely, is that before the brits. some half-breed-europeans like the aryans, the ino-scythians (or shakas. buddha is shaka, ergo, a half-breed european gave religion to the orient), the white huns, the etc. who invaded india repeatedly, CIVILIZED (read "justified brit. colonization") the vernas or natives of india. in the "empire strikes back version" of this, modern indian scholars (with the help of archaeogenetics & continuing excavations and finds of MORE & MORE indus/saraswat civilization ruins (as far away as in bangladesh - discovered 2 months ago), conjecture that the huns, the kushans etc. or even the so called aryans were never foreign tribes but indigenous culture movements and in fact the same people populate the greater indus/saraswat area as the people who populated this area eons ago - no trace of "outside" infiltration. they conjecture that the indus people were of the same ethnic or racial stock as the people of that area even today - genetic studies support this. further that these people fanned out to inhabit and influence iran and beyond and up the silk road towards mongolia and russia and via the sea route via asian islands to populate korea and japan (japanese has a striking structural similarity with tamil!). ergo, the movement was 'totally in the opposite direction as earlier claimed (only ONE movement out of africa to india and then out of india to the world --> the ultimate, fantastic, hyperbole conclusion). no this is not a political interpretation but one that is gaining more currency among historians owing to more and more archaeological discoveries. (feel free to ask me more.)
• disclaimer: i am from the N(itwit)POV. i subscribe to none of these theories. read not too much.
• re: That there were an original prakrit or an original bengali spoken by the aryan tribes besides sanskrit in vedic times yes! they were languages that developed in parallel with sanskrit. they were contemporaries of sanskrit not derivatives of it. so one panini stood up and polished it's grammar. so the hindu scriptures are in sanskrit. yet prakrits (prakrits, unlike sanskrit is a "family" of languages; a trillion languages, many perhaps extinct or evolved into some other language now) may have been older than sanskrit? actually little is known about prakrits (those prakrits like "old sanskrit" & "(rig) vedic sanskrit" as opposed to "sanskrit-as-we-know-it-today") read wikipedia:prakrits - it's short and addresses your dilemna. and of course, these weren't spoken by "aryan" tribes 'cos "aryan tribes" is vague and contentious. sanskrit and prakrits were spoken by the indigenous people of india because modern archaeogenetics point to a little or no infiltration into the gene people of the subcontinent since way back BC. feel free to ask me for links if you are curious. not all of wikipedia's articles are from the NPOV on this score, for example wikipedia:jats is chauvinistic. i uncyc'ed it - Jats
• wikipedia:Indo-Aryan languages has been re-termed wikipedia:Indo-Iranian languages or more popularly wikipedia:Indo-European languages because the former is NON PC. that should clarify a lot of things?
• your "history in C" is a nice and contemporary parody and should not be changed till the school textbooks of India are changed (which might happen as early as in my next life!) -- mowgli 08:59, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Besides, "colonial" contexts, isn't that what overly british humour is all about? If your national pride is hurt by this, why just not answer with something like the "explantory" text about my home country Sweden, that I once read in an indian school book:

Sweden tin se ka desh hai - sin, sex aur suicide-- Swami A. Suresh

my good sir, a couple of points:

• my national pride is not hurt. you cannot hurt my national pride. i won't tell you how you can hurt it - you have to figure it out on your own.
• my point. my point. my point. my point was (i'm explaining an explanation!):
  • my point was NOT about pc and non pc humour;
  • my point was using a vehicle to deride something that is "out of context." it might look jarring. for example, if i write - mahatma gandhi said to jinnah, "yo, eat shit fucker! AAAA AAA" I WON'T FIND IT FUNNY (subjective opinion -- you might differ, i know -- i'm only EXPLAINING my subjective opinion, not entreating you to change what you are writing -- not in this instant case in any case) because we know gandhi did not speak american slang or uncyc. slang. I will find it jarring.
  • the only thing i requested you to actually ABSTAIN from (and it was a request) was to avoid the "khari boli" parody because you were quite obviously wrong in your factual interpretation there.
  • please carry on editing "hindi." you were doing a good job and i'm looking forward to more.
  • where is your "sweden" quote from?
  • all said and done, spread wikipedia:wiki love -- mowgli 09:11, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Well - I wanted to change that about national pride but my computer hang up. I don't think that - I rather propose that wikipedia should be filled with conscious bigotry and other forms of prejudicements - especially colonial ones. In order to work though, they must be consciously written bigotries. Unconscious ones just look stupid, backward and annoying. -- Swami A. Suresh 09:54, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Most of this article repeatedly incorporate very perfect info about URDU that info should be recolllected in a seperate article.

also the talk about HINDI relates closely to the WIKIPEDIA so it should be made more like UNCYCLOPEDIA – Preceding unsigned comment added by 39.47.122.131 (talk • contribs)

Urdu Image

"Urdu" written in the Urdu Script. Urdu is the same as Hindi's Devanagari script, but it is written right to left instead of left to rigth. Urdu is also less distinguishable from Graffiti

actually, "urdu script is the same as hindi's devanagari script." you might want to tweak it a bit without losing the essence of your statement. these scripts and languages bit can be a bit tough - i know. china has several languages but china forced a common script - it gave the chinese a national identity. soviet union did the same thing (afghans were forced to write pashto and dari in the russian script). democratic india could neither adopt a common language nor common script. now that really hurt my national pride in 1947. nehru never listened to me. he was too busy with edwina mountbatten. he died of syphillis; i didn't kill him. -- mowgli 09:42, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Just to make it clear - I can read perfectly well both Hindi and Urdu scriptures and know they have nothing in common. But uncyclopedia should not know it. -- Swami A. Suresh 10:15, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

the last 2 changes you made to the above caption, viz. "backwards" & "script" make it perfect. :) -- mowgli 10:30, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

(Rewrite)

ok after you're done maybe you can put it on the main page under recent articles as "Hindi (rewrite)"...-- mowgli 10:39, 22 August 2006 (UTC)