Date: Sat, 25 May 2002 06:52:37 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> Cc: Marc Ramirez <mrami@mrami.homeunix.org>, Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Aryan and Dravidian (was: French, Flemish and English (was: cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha clock.c)) Message-ID: <20020525045236.GA1722@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <20020525140432.B84264@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <20020522182914.I45715@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020524110009.T21090-100000@mrami.homeunix.org> <20020524173331.A5683@lpt.ens.fr> <20020525103645.A52737@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020525032513.GA1425@lpt.ens.fr> <20020525140432.B84264@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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Greg 'groggy' Lehey said on May 25, 2002 at 14:04:32:
> > Many Hindi speakers today have problems saying "sh" and convert it
> > to "s"; they also have problems with two consonants succeeding each
> > other. So they not only convert English words like "school" to
> > "ischool", but also Sanskrit-origin Hindi words like "stree"
> > ("woman") to "istree"
>
> Interesting. The Malays have gone one step further and pronounce it
> "isteri" (meaning "wife"). Again, the voiceless "e".
The Malay language is also called "Bahasa" I believe, and so is the
related Indonesian language. "Bhasha" means "language" in Sanskrit
and most other Indian languages. I found that a semi-Malay relative
of mine was unaware of that origin.
> > "tesan." And a name like "Krishna"
>
> Wasn't that originally Krsna, with a fluid instead of a vowel?
Yes, it should be written Krshna (the sh is one of the two Sanskrit
sh letters, the one in "Sri" being the other one). The Sanskrit "s"
is the letter in "stree" for "woman". But in English it's usually
spelt "Krishna", perhaps for easy pronunciation.
> Hmm. There are other issues apart from pronunciation. I believe the
> grammar has diverged considerably both in India and in Europe
> (interestingly giving rise to excessive use of the present participle
> both in English and in Hindi IIRC).
True, I don't know much about Sanskrit grammar but it seems totally
different from any modern language. There aren't separate words for
prepositions, declensions, etc, they're all modified forms of the
noun. Also, as in German, compound words are formed from simple
words, and indeed an entire line is frequently written as a single
word. It seemed initially strange to me that in French there is no
distinction between "I go" and "I am going" -- both are "je vais"
but now that I think of it, the same is true of Sanskrit.
> language spoken in Tamil Nadu. In particular, it retains more Aryan
> words, whereas in Tamil Nadu they try to replace them with
> Tamil-derived words. It rather reminds me of the difference between
> Flemish and Dutch :-)
Hm, I've heard that Sri Lankan Tamil is much "purer" than the Tamil
Nadu version because it has *less* Sanskrit influence... There is
indeed a movement to get rid of the non-Dravidian words in Tamil, but
I don't know to what extent it has been successful, and certainly I
don't think it looks like a worthwhile exercise.
The other thing about Tamil in Tamil Nadu is that the written
language, or the formal spoken language, is *very* different from the
informal spoken language; I'm reasonably comfortable in the informal
version but can barely understand the formal version, having always
lived in non-Tamil-speaking regions. I'm told that the divergence
between the two forms is not so sharp in Sri Lanka, and indeed I have
some trouble understanding Sri Lankan Tamils.
- Rahul
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