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Languages of India

Printed From: History Community ~ All Empires
Category: Regional History or Period History
Forum Name: History of the South Asian subcontinent
Forum Discription: The Indian sub-continent and South Central Asia
URL: http://www.allempires.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=8832
Printed Date: 15-Jun-2024 at 21:08
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Topic: Languages of India
Posted By: Guests
Subject: Languages of India
Date Posted: 03-Feb-2006 at 06:13

This thread is about Languages of India.We may later on branch out to include different dialects too.You may include different scripts which are used to write  languages of India in this thread.

I propose we start out with Languages which have been recognised by the Constitution {as national languages---or just recognised I'm not sure}.

Herez a cut,copy,paste job.All AE members are welcome to participate and elaborate.

                                           

 

     Languagesof       India

 

There are 22 languages recognized by the Indian Constitution. These languages are

    1. Assamese
    2. Bengali
    3. Bodo
    4. Dogri
    5. Gujarati
    6. Hindi
    7. Kannada
    8. Kashmiri
    9. Konkani
    10. Maithili
    11. Malayalam
    12. Manipuri
    13. Marathi
    14. Nepali
    15. Oriya
    16. Punjabi
    17. Sanskrit
    18. Santhali
    19. Sindhi
    20. Tamil
    21. Telugu
    22. Urdu

Hindi is the official and main link language of India. Its homeland is mainly in the north of India, but it is spoken and widely understood in all urban centers of India. It is written in the Devanagri script, which is phonetic and, unlike English, is pronounced as it is written. Hindi is a direct descendant of Sanskrit through Prakrit and Apabhramsha. It has been influenced and enriched by Dravidian, Turkish, Farsi, Arabic, Portugese and English. It is a very expressive language. In poetry and songs, it can convey emotions using simple and gentle words. It can also be used for exact and rational reasoning.

 

 

http://indiaimage.nic.in/languages.htm - http://indiaimage.nic.in/languages.htm

 

 




Replies:
Posted By: Omar al Hashim
Date Posted: 03-Feb-2006 at 19:27
Did Hindi exist before '47 or was it created afterwards? Urdu with a sanskrit alphabet?

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Posted By: Jhangora
Date Posted: 04-Feb-2006 at 15:53

Originally posted by Omar al Hashim

Did Hindi exist before '47 or was it created afterwards? Urdu with a sanskrit alphabet?

It certainly did.It's script is known as devnagri.Sanskrit and some other languages r written in Devnagri too.Let's create a databse of knowledge before we start asking questions.



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Jai Badri Vishal


Posted By: TeldeIndus
Date Posted: 04-Feb-2006 at 15:57
welcome back Jhangora. No more nasty website postings from now on..  

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We are not without accomplishment. We have managed to distribute poverty - Nguyen Co Thatch, Vietnamese foreign minister


Posted By: Jhangora
Date Posted: 04-Feb-2006 at 16:18

Originally posted by TeldeIndus

welcome back Jhangora. No more nasty website postings from now on..  

Nasty?Which one?



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Jai Badri Vishal


Posted By: jayeshks
Date Posted: 10-Feb-2006 at 04:24
Originally posted by Omar al Hashim

Did Hindi exist before '47 or was it created afterwards? Urdu with a sanskrit alphabet?


Well yes and no.  Classical Hindi did exist in forms of Brijbhasha, Avadhi etc. before the Mogul conquest but it wasn't exactly like what people claiming to speak Hindi today speak.  Thereafter Urdu got created by putting Persian words on a Hindi like grammar.  I'm kind of bothered that they're considered two separate languages in the above list.  I mean how many people actually speak Hindi without any borrowed Persian or Urdu without any Sanskrit derived words?  They're just two extremes of the same common spectrum.  What's next, we're going to start splitting hairs over whether Indian and Pakistani Punjabi or East and West Bengali are separate languages?


Posted By: Mameluke
Date Posted: 21-Feb-2006 at 12:41

Urdu is a Turkish/Mongolian word meaning "armed camp". In fact the English word "horde" is derived similarly. The reason for the language being called Urdu (or Ordu) is that the Muslim armies in India needed a lingua franca to communicate with the natives, who spoke Prakrit, which is an ancestor of modern Hindi. They added in plenty of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish words - and Urdu was born. It is a pity that all this has taken on communalistic overtones. Both languages, Urdu and Hindi, have their own charm. No need to get religion involved in this.

Mameluke



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Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war


Posted By: Killabee
Date Posted: 21-Feb-2006 at 14:42
Originally posted by Mameluke

Urdu is a Turkish/Mongolian word meaning "armed camp". In fact the English word "horde" is derived similarly. The reason for the language being called Urdu (or Ordu) is that the Muslims in India needed a lingua franca to communicate with the natives, who spoke Prakrit, which is an ancestor of modern Hindi. They added in plenty of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish words - and Urdu was born. It is a pity that all this has taken on communalistic overtones. Both languages, Urdu and Hindi, have their own charm. No need to get religion involved in this.

Mameluke

Are they mutually intelligble? In other word, can a urdu-speaker communicate with a hindi-speaker by speaking his own language?

 



Posted By: Mameluke
Date Posted: 21-Feb-2006 at 14:52
Originally posted by Killabee

Originally posted by Mameluke

Urdu is a Turkish/Mongolian word meaning "armed camp". In fact the English word "horde" is derived similarly. The reason for the language being called Urdu (or Ordu) is that the Muslims in India needed a lingua franca to communicate with the natives, who spoke Prakrit, which is an ancestor of modern Hindi. They added in plenty of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish words - and Urdu was born. It is a pity that all this has taken on communalistic overtones. Both languages, Urdu and Hindi, have their own charm. No need to get religion involved in this.

 

Mameluke

Are they mutually intelligble? In other word, can a urdu-speaker communicate with a hindi-speaker by speaking his own language?

Certainly. One of the reasons being that modern Hindi uses many, many Urdu words, and vice versa.

Mameluke

 



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Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war


Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 01-Mar-2006 at 10:01


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Posted By: Apples n Oranges
Date Posted: 16-Apr-2006 at 12:37

Some information on Assamese

Assamese

The Easternmost Indo-European Language



Oh, My Musical Tongue
The Lyrical Voice of Assam

Assamese is the eastern-most language of the Indo-European family of langauges. It is spoken by about twenty million people in Assam on both banks of the mighty Brahmaputra. It has an illustrious written history going back almost a thousand years.

The Assamese language grew out of Sanskrit, the ancient language of the Indian subcontinent. However, its vocabulary, phonology and grammar have been substantially influenced by the original inhabitants of Assam, such as the Boros and the Kacharis.

Assamese Alphabet

The Assamese script has 41 consonants and 11 vowels. These are similar to the Devnagari script which is used by ftp://chandra.astro.indiana.edu/pub/itrans-4.0/readme/%3e%20Sanskrit%3c/a%3e,%20the%20classical%20language%20of%20India,%20and%20%3cahref=" ftp: chandra.astro.indiana.edu pub itrans-4.0 readme?>Hindi , the present national language. (Check out the ASCII/Indian-script song book for http://chandra.astro.indiana.edu/isongs/%3e%20Sanskrit%3c/a%3eand%20%3cahref=" http: chandra.astro.indiana.edu:80 isongs hindi hindex.html?>Hindi ) The language has a number of http://www.assam.org/assam/language/alphabets.html#juktakhars - juktakhars which are combination of consonants. They are not simple juxtaposition, rather some combination of modified versions of the consonants. Surprisingly about 80 of them exists and each of them need to be defined in the font for a complete representation. Another characteristic of Sanskrit based language is the use of post-consonantal forms of the vowels. Unlike the Roman script, a vowel used after a consonant changes form and gets attached to the consonant.

Vowels

The Assamese vowels are shown below:

The phonetic representation of the vowels are:

a aa i ii
u uu ree
e oi o au

Consonants

The Assamese consonants:

The phonetic representation of the consonants are:

 

ka kha ga gha unga
ca cca ja jha niya
ta tha da dha na
ta tha da dha na
pa pha ba bha ma
ja ra la wa
xa xa xa ha
khya ya Ra Ra

The last four characters are called khanda-ta, anuswar, bixarga, chandrabindu. The third and fourth rows are similar sounds but differ on the stress. The three xa are a special sound not seen in other Sanskrit based language. They can be either termed as gutteral-kha or soft-sa.

http://www.assam.org/assam/language/ - http://www.assam.org/assam/language/




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Posted By: Gharanai
Date Posted: 16-Apr-2006 at 17:50

Well nice information add, I guess there are some people in India who speak Pashtu (I am not sure about it), so please could anyone of you from India, elaborate this to me please I know that there is around 40,000 Pashtuns living in India (as Wiki says).

 



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Posted By: K. V. Ramakrishna Rao
Date Posted: 17-Apr-2006 at 05:06

The map shown by "DEMI SODA" , excluding certain area of J&K is not correct.

When the saints, poets and others  like Srimat Sankaradeva (Assam), Chaitany (Bengal), Vallabacharya, Guru Nanak, Tulasidas, Raghavendra and others were travelling throughout India in their periods (many of them have visted our state Tamilnadu), how they were conversing with others crossing beariers?

 



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History is not what was written or is written, but it is actually what had happened in the past.



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