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About Hindi script

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dakanga

About Hindi script

Post by dakanga »

Spoken by over 500 million people around the world, Hindi is one of the official languages of India and Fiji. It is also one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. Hindi is originally based on Sanskrit, including its name which originated from the Sanskrit word "Sindhu" (another name for the Indus River). ref

The Persians designated the land around the Indus River as Hindu, a mispronunciation of the Sanskrit sindhu which means “Land of the Indus River”. Turkish invaders in the early 11th century named the language of the region Hindi, ‘language of the land of the Indus River’.

Hindi uses the देवनागरी devanagari script, which is used for over 120 languages, and is where consonant-vowel pairs are written as a unit.

Devanagari is a phonetic script (that is, each letter stands for one sound), there's no need to have a name for each letter. Instead, you can simply call the letter by the sound it makes, followed by a sound like the "a" in majority.

The alphabet / वर्णमाला (Varnamaala : ("garland of letters") ) for Devanagari has 47 primary characters, and is written from left to right. ref

Horizontal line

The horizontal bar is used to group letters belonging to a word, and is called शिरोरेखा shirorekhā. Letters on their own have this line except for two consonants:ध [dh] and भ [bh]

The right vertical stroke after a character

24 out of the 36 consonants contain a vertical right stroke, for example ख [kh], घ [gh], ण [n]. This angled substroke is used to indicate that a consonant symbol stands for a consonant without any vowel. ref
The right stroke is also used to mark a full stop. But nowadays, a normal full stop is frequently used to end a sentence.
Also see here.

Varnas letter characters

Varna वर्ण (letter character) are broadly classified into

  • स्वर (swar) vowels ², and
  • व्यंजन (vyanjan) consonants ².

Vowels and consonants in ordered in the alphabet, starting with sounds pronounced at the back of the mouth and proceeds to sounds produced at the front.

Because Hindi is highly phonetic, you can predict a word’s pronunciation from its written form.

The Duolingo course focuses on teaching you all of the script first.

Duolingo also has a separate character resource : https://www.duolingo.com/characters

References :
https://omniglot.com/writing/hindi.htm
https://www.easyhindityping.com/hindi-alphabet
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-purpo ... s-Sanskrit
https://www.hindivivek.com/hindi-varna- ... short form.
https://alphabetsinhindi.com/how-many-v ... -in-hindi/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari
https://blogs.languagecurry.com/article ... nd-vyanjan
https://hindilanguage.info/devanagari/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Devanagari
https://sites.google.com/a/balodyan.com ... -explained
https://www.typotheque.com/articles/dev ... _character
https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/100/wor ... duism.html
https://rajbhasha.gov.in/hi
https://taj.oasis.unc.edu/Hindi.Less.25/wrtingsys.htm

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dakanga

Re: About Hindi script

Post by dakanga »

Online dictionaries :

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dicti ... lish-hindi
https://www.shabdkosh.com/dictionary/english-hindi

Can people recommend other resources ?
Such as other dictionaries, verb conjugation resources, grammar and learning resources ?

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dakanga

Re: About Hindi script

Post by dakanga »

Last edited by dakanga on Sat Mar 25, 2023 12:54 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: moved to a post about numbers and money
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dakanga

Re: About Hindi script

Post by dakanga »

characters in the Duolingo course

Hindi transliterated info
🔈 ka
🔈 kha
🔈 ga
🔈 gha
🔈 ca
🔈 cha
🔈 ja
🔈 jha
🔈 Ta
🔈 Tha
🔈 Da
Dha
🔈 ta
🔈 tha
🔈 da
🔈 dha
🔈 na
🔈 pa
🔈 pha
🔈 ba
🔈 bha
🔈 ma
🔈 ya
🔈 ra
🔈 la
va
🔈 sha
Sha
🔈 sa
🔈 ha

Total 30 in all above

Borrowed Characters

Hindi transliterated info
क़ qa
ख़ Kha
ग़ Ga
ज़ za
ड़ Ra
ढ़ Rha
फ़ fa

Total 7 borrowed characters

Vowels

Hindi transliterated info
🔈 a
🔈 aa
🔈 i
🔈 ii
🔈 u
uu
🔈 e
🔈 ai
o
🔈 au

Total 10 vowels

Combinations

Hindi transliterated info
का kaa
के ke
की kii
को ko
कृ kri
झे jhe
ना naa
दे de
ति ti
मा maa
मी mii
मु mu
बू buu
ला laa
ri
रु ru
रू ruu
वा vaa
से se
सौ sau
है hai

Total 21 combinations

Total of all characters : 68

Attribution for audio links, on the symbol 🔈, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)


Also see:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix ... Devanagari
https://www.mezzoguild.com/hindi-alphabet/
http://mylanguages.org/hindi_alphabet.php
https://app.memrise.com/course/353095/h ... gri-audio/


note: this table is currently being edited to add additional audio and other embelishments. Thank you for your patience.

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PtolemysXX
Uganda

Re: About Hindi script

Post by PtolemysXX »

Awesome work @dakanga ! Do you have an idea why on some systems the audio cannot be heard? I can't hear anything on my Android mobile and on one PC with Windows 10 while on another PC audio works just fine.

While the quality of full words is decent, synthetic generation of single phonemes is dismal in my opinion. When I listen to ga - gha I could swear I hear da - dha. It may be just my ears. Still I think it would be great if we could get real mp3 recordings of the devnagri alphabet made by a native Hindi speaker...

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dakanga

Re: About Hindi script

Post by dakanga »

I wish I knew the answer to those questions.

Thanks also for the heads up on this issue, as well as this valued review that benefits our community.

I will also link to actual audio files that others have produced for all these sounds, where I am able to locate them, adding the links to the post above.

Please keep reviewing things, and also asking questions. And hopefully others will also add to this resource.
As a community - together.

edited: Also, I am planning to continue to add to some resources here for English speakers learning Hindi, along the ways of learning I find effective.

Which for a language with a different script to English means learning the letters in interesting chunks.
Using words that are more likely to be familiar to the English speaker, or of key importance to learn in the very first steps of learning a new language. Very high use words. Working from what is already known and with links that could be made to to assist learning, and words that are useful or fun. Also with a focus on nouns or simple actions - as they can often be easier to recall, rather than abstract concepts. And with not too much focus on grammar. The focus being on learning and using the characters.

This is what I pushed for for the development of the Duolingo Greek course. Though it took many many months to do and discuss with others in the team. It took reams time/typing. And huge spreadsheets as well.

It will be interesting to see how this goes. And how we might do this as a more open community. Bearing in mind, you can never please everyone. And different things are relevant, valued more, by different people.
It will be an adventure if nothing at all ..... .. .

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