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0 pointsarp2425y ago0 comments

So if I understand correctly, Latin characters aren't used for loanwords like this in written text?

When I was young I used to play some MSX games in Japanese, the language doesn't really matter for a lot of these 1980s games, and you would frequently see English words and terms written in Latin characters used all over the place.

Why won't this work for Hindi? Are people not familiar with these characters? Or is there just no tradition of doing so?

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captn3m05y ago· 2 in thread

> So if I understand correctly, Latin characters aren't used for loanwords like this in written text?

It happens in casual text - WhatsApp forwards, SMS messages. But for official writing - you pick a language and stick to it, as much as possible. This made more than a few notices impossibly hard to read when I was in college, because the Hindi felt archaic, even if it wasn't.

Other countries had a rich culture of research and scientific literature published in native languages. India never got that to a national scale, because India has hundreds of languages[0] so any efforts were local. A paper published in Tamil would be unreadable by folks a hundred miles away, so English became the technical lingua-franca of the nation (The colonial imposition didn't help either).

When a developer searches stack-overflow for an answer, english works better because it serves all developers in India.

[0]: India scores 0.914 on the Linguistic diversity Index, which ranges from 0 (everyone has the same mother tongue) to 1 (no two people have the same mother tongue)

arp242OP5y ago

I think English is the lingua franca of science and computing pretty much anywhere now? Just as Latin was in the past? Newton didn't publish in English, but in Latin, as did most people of his day.

In Dutch, I would just say "de server is kapot" ("the server is broken"). There is no attempt to translate words like "server" to Dutch. You see the same in Indonesian (standard Indonesian, Bahasa, there are many Indonesian languages) where these kind of words are just copied ad-verbatim from either English or (for older words) Dutch. For many technical terms in the IT world there are no "Dutch words": just the English ones. The exceptions seem to be the ones where there are Dutch words that are close enough to the English ones ("function" → "functie", "variables" → "variabelen"). Both languages having similar Germanic roots with Latin/Greek influences helps I suppose.

And in those cases all the languages use the same Latin script, so it's easier to include loanwords and technical terms.

So it seems to me, unless I'm misunderstanding something, that it's at least partly an issue of script translations? Adopting the example someone else posted, why shouldn't "नमस्ते आप कैसे हैं? मेरा server ओली हूँ" be considered acceptable Hindi?

xxpor5y ago

For the English words used in Dutch, do you use Dutch pronunciation, even if the word is spelled the same?

We all know how Dutch people like to pronounce their Gs :)

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OJFord5y ago

That does happen, a common word for 'school' is स्कूल ('skūl') for example.

It's just that another phenomenon is the alphabeticising of Hindi (as in actually Hindi words) like 'namaste aap kaise hain? Mera naam Ollie hoon' (IAST āp, nām, olī, and hūñ) is a contrived sentence but the sort of thing someone might text if they didn't have the keyboard for नमस्ते आप कैसे हैं? मेरा नाम ओली हूँ or whatever reason.

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