Date: Sat, 25 May 2002 11:25:36 +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: <20020525092536.GA2133@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <20020525150519.D84264@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> <20020525045236.GA1722@lpt.ens.fr> <20020525150519.D84264@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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Greg 'groggy' Lehey said on May 25, 2002 at 15:05:19: > This is just a matter of orthography. The German word > "Elektronenaufenthaltswahrscheinlichkeit" could be translated into > English as "Electron Location Probability". That's three words in > English and only one in German, but in reality it wouldn't make any > difference to the German pronunciation if it were written "Elektronen > Aufenthalts Wahrscheinlichkeit", It makes a difference in Sanskrit if the first word ends with a vowel (most nouns end with a short a) and the second word begins with a vowel; there are rules for how to combine the vowels. (There are such rules for consonants too, but I think those are usually straightforward.) eg, "katha" + "upanishad" = "kathopanishad", etc. I believe in some cases it can also lead to actual ambiguities about where to split the compound sentence: the same sentence can be interpreted in two contradictory ways. But I'm not enough of a scholar to supply an example. > > 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. > > Hmm. You sound like Kumar. What's your native language? Tamil. It's what we spoke at home but I never learned it formally. My "best language" is English, which is, for better or worse, not an uncommon situation in urban India. - Rahul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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