Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. India is much more diverse than that.
In my youth I spent some time bumming around Saurashtra, a region in Gujarat state that's about 150 miles square. Nearly 50 languages are indigenous to that one region alone. Not dialects. Languages. It's wonderful, but nuts.
That was almost 20 years ago; no doubt it's more homogenous now, which is sad to think about. A century ago nearly 80 languages were spoken there, so linguistic diversity has been declining fast. Any effort to preserve it deserves applause.
I am a native Indian, born, raised and living there (I mean in India). I find it hard to process this claim. I am pretty sure there are about 10 languages in any fairly diverse region of the country, but beyond that what we find are mostly dialects of various languages.
I am not sure if you are a 'western mind' (as you self identify in a later post) of Indian descent and whether you made that claim based on reading about Indian languages or by interacting with locals and asking them if they spoke languages or dialects. You see, almost all Indian languages (AFAIK) lack words to distinguish the concept of language and dialect. For academics sake, linguists do use some words but they haven't trickled down to general public. The tendency is to use the word 'bhasha' (or its variations such as bhashe, basai etc), which just means 'language', for both language and dialect, and even for such ideas as register and slang. So, any claim made by the general public about they speaking a different 'bhashe' must be evaluated properly and not taken at face value.
Anyhow, for Saurashtra, I really did mean "language" and not "dialect". Honestly it's not a typical example of India, but is fun to use for dramatic effect. You know those 500 princely states that existed before unification? 200 of them were in Saurashtra (which is tiny). Politically, it was basically the India of India.
The linguistics seem to reflect that. At one point I recall finding myself in a tiny village somewhere near Dwarka where the residents spoke something completely baffling to me, with not a shred of English or Hindi or Gujarati in the mix. I was completely out of luck communicating with the locals, and had to rely on passing bus drivers for orientation. Later I read a book which said that there were a handful of tiny little Dravidian isolate languages scattered around Saurashtra; I must have stumbled across one of those. The claim of "50 languages" comes from that book, whatever it was. Feels about right, based on personal experience, but I can't really defend the claim beyond that.
(Also I should re-iterate that this was almost 20 years ago, and I very much doubt that there are any places so isolated today.)
1: Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India: 122 major languages and 1599 minor languages counted in the 2001 census.
I think me means dialects. Which many times can sound very different. During my first semester engineering we had a electronics lecturer who came from North Karnataka. They speak a fairly different dialect of Kannada. When I heard her talking for the first time, I was quite startled to see that some thing like that would also mean Kannada. In Bangalore we have our typical street slang Kannada, heavily overloaded with English words.
Same is true of Urdu as well. Even the Dakhani Accent has so many varieties, some times it could sound strange hearing some one speak Urdu in Bangalore, then Tumkur and then Mysore(All districts close to each other).
My family has their own language that is spoken by 2-3 villages max. 80 languages in a region is perfectly believable .
> five of the most widely used scripts in India—Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurumukhi, Tamil, and Latin. Those five scripts support seven or eight of India’s most widely used languages, together spoken by hundreds of millions of people across the Indian subcontinent.
this list of scripts actually does not cover (for example) Bengali and Telugu, which together have more speakers than the population of the United States.
Over a 200km distance, people definitely would have trouble understanding each other without using a common standardised language ("Standard Dutch", which we learn in school), even when "officially" they are speaking the same "language". On TV, people who don't use the standardised language are subtitled.
So, I haven't been to India, but what you describe seems quite natural.
I think we should all speak one language (preferably, the one we're speaking now). The information suddenly marketable to or directly consumable by anyone at any given place will significantly increase.
The existence of diversity is generally a sign of freedom and self-sufficiency: that the people in question were/are free to retain and develop/enrich their own culture, and yet function successfully (enough) in interaction with the broader society, without too much pressure to give up their ways. (See: “melting pot” and “salad bowl”.) Monocultures, monolingualism, monotheism, etc., do have certain advantages too of course, but I hope some can see why diversity is valuable too.
People are all different and why should they not choose to communicate/eat/enjoy themselves as they wish, with all the advantages and disadvantages of their choices?
(Plus in the case of languages there are things which can be said in some and really can't be said in others. My wife, child and I would typically speak multiple languages, sometimes even in the same sentence, in order to convey the nuance of what we wanted to say. Hell, even in English there are things said in discipline-specific jargons that aren't really communicable any other way).
Settling on a "common" or "business" language, though, is entirely possible, and has been done many times in history. No language ever encompassed the whole world, and if one language has it's English, right now. Latin, Arabic, Mandarin, French, English, Spanish... The world has seen its share of common languages used within certain spheres of influence.
Ĉar diverseco estas la bazo de ĉia belo kaj ĉia kreemo. Sin diverseco, vivo estus sensignifa.
> I think we should all speak one language (preferably, the one we're speaking now).
Certe, mi konsentas -- sed nur aldone al vian unikan lokan lingvon. Kaj ne la Anglan, mi petas!
If the above statement sounds wrong, it's because __it is__
We should let other cultures and languages to thrive by themselves; as this is the primary reason of evolution of our business language too. If multiple languages would not suddenly exist, our business language will stop borrowing from other languages and would cease to advance by itself.
Gods no. You'll have to pry my other two languages from my cold, dead tongue. Just the ability to have private conversations in public feels like a superpower. The amazing puns you can make up is also a huge benefit - I can amuse myself all the time.
Plus, you know, cultural diversity, accessing millennia of literature and history etc. But that's the boring stuff /s
Good grief.
Even dialects have very different sounding words or pronunciations which increases the complexity exponentially. But I am trying it only with an eye on its potential. NLP will simply act as the catalyst for technology adoption in the rural and semi-rural area.
I'm thinking to study China's approach here since I heard even Chinese is incredibly diverse.
For younger generation this is not a problem, back in my college life where people in the same class came from different areas, from Xinjiang to Canton to the northeast corner. We have no problem understanding each other though sometimes funny with unique words or accents.
It seems that the problem is not as severe in China as in India.
Did you intend for that to come across as condescending?
Egads, that's terrible company to keep. Moving on now...
Just nitpicking, but the distinction is entirely political. In China, people speak Chinese dialects, that are much more diverse than the difference between the Danish language and the Swedish language.
Since China wants to look united, these are "dialects", while Denmark and Sweden wants to be separate sovereign nations they want to have distinct languages, so Danish and Swedish are not some Scandinavian dialects.
> " kos kos par badle paani,chaar kos par baani, par ek hai jo nahi badalta vo hai Hindustani"
Rough Translation:
> Taste of water changes every 2 miles, language changes every 4 miles, but Indian still don't change.
Literal translation doesn't work here (also one of the shortcomings of tools like Google Translate)
Xenophobic much?
Looking at the repo for these Indian fonts you can see that they use FontLab Studio[2] for the work. Browsing the homepage reveals how complicated and involved font crafting is -- let alone the design!
[1] Metafont: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont
[2] FontLab Studio: https://www.fontlab.com/font-editor/fontlab-studio/
CJK scripts have traditionally used Ming, Song, and Gothic (sans-serif) typefaces.
I also believe that google's text to speech is more 'easy' for Hindi than for English. There is rarely an ambiguity in Hindi text-to-speech than in English text-to-speech. For instance, in English it would write the pun equivalent text "Crypto current seas", and later correct it to "cryptocurrencies" once it has more context, but this is rarely needed in Hindi.
1. https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/in/pdf/2017/04/Indi...
well, I will not go there! But the absence of Telugu font in talking about Indian fonts is eerily disconcerting.
It was just a mistake. Given the topic, it's possible that that was written by someone who's not a native speaker - but whose writing is otherwise very good. (And arguably better than that showoff sentence!)
As you noted, a native American English speaker would write "...a language whose reach..." And that's that.
RIP John Clarke:
I call it Governmental failure of either educating the masses with regards to learning Hindi or them being unable to cater to the local needs (not printing enough forms in the local language). This was in turn exploited by the regional parties who converted this issue to a language-war of sorts, trying to portray that the Central government is imposing Hindi and diminishing the local language. These "movements" were used mainly for political gain. The reason you don't see this happen in the North is because for most, Hindi is a natural fallback language as the script is similar (Devanagari) to their Mother tongue, unlike in the South.
We are pro-OurLanguage, whatever that language. If that feels anti-Hindi to you, one can't help.
You almost are suggesting to be pro-YourLanguage one has to throw out their their language.
Learning English is viewed as a "job" thing -- it's what you do to have a good career. And English isn't used in the same ways as native languages are. A lot of the serious literature, art and politics happens exclusively in languages that are not English and using English in these contexts outs you as the equivalent of the "condescending coastal elite" in the US.
I don't think there's a good solution to CJK web fonts yet. If one existed, I think it would need to involve a font rendering technology where character shapes can be generated from strokes and radicals, instead of the literal shape of every character having to appear separately in the font.
Edit: s/can/could (thanks to child commenter).
And when you say “super involved”, keep in mind that part of the required process is to travel back in time to before April 2012, because “The application window for the first application round closed in April 2012. Comprehensive reviews of the program are currently underway to assess its performance in meeting intended objectives. These reviews will inform ongoing discussions with the ICANN community to determine when a second round will take place.” [0]
blog.google is used pretty often.
Anyone could during the one-time “new gTLD” scramble, but applications closed for that years ago; no decision on any subsequent round has yet been made, because the review of that first round has not yet been completed.
So, other than establishing a new country and getting a new ccTLD, there's no way to get a new TLD right now.
No, ICANN years ago allowed that for a limited time, and is currently reviewing the results of that to decide if, when, and how to do so again.
Provided they realize there is a greater web beyond facebook and the various trap gardens.
