About Hindi & Devanagari

Hindi might be better described as a “family of related languages with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility” than a specific one. Other Indian languages also have varying degreees of mutual intelligibilty. Traditionally, Hindi was written with Devanagari script, as several other Indian languages have been. Currently the other main languages that use Devanagari script are Marathi and Nepali. Some would argue that if you write Urdu in Devanagari script, you could call it Hindi. I believe the biggest difference between verbal Hindi and Urdu is in the number of dialects. My Bangladeshi friend is verbally fluent in both, can’t read either script, and says there are differences. She’s the lawyer, and the one who’s fluent. I’ll leave it to the experts.

Today, many Indians do use Roman letters to write in Hindi, but Devanagari is MORE phonetic. For example, when you write “Hindi” in Roman letters, it has two i’s. When Hindi is written in Devanagari the i’s are different. “Hindi2” is REALLY about using “Devanagari to” provide phonetic cues for learning pronuniciation of words in new languages. “Hindi” is easier to remember and spell. As demonstrated by the example with Urdu, sometimes the biggest differences between Indian languages are the scripts. Sometimes differences between languages are minimized when written in the same script. Even when languages truly are significantly different, it may be useful to learn different languages with the help of the same phonetic script.

MD is always right

The tagline for Hindi2 is partly a play on words, from the founder’s time working as a nurse. Actually, Medical Doctors are NOT “always right”, but they give “educated opinions” about “right treatments”. Sometimes there is more than one potentially correct treatment option. Likewise, there might be more than one “right way” to phonetically pronounce words. Hindi2.com will give an “educated opinion” for pronunciation linked to an example based on a Modified form of Devanagari script (MD). Most medical doctors do try to learn from mistakes, and so will we. Suggestions are welcome.

An attempt will be made to link MD with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and audio examples. The “right way” to pronounce English words may be debatable, but the goal will be to follow the example with MD, based on the IPA. Written MD script will be based on speech to text technology (always right for audio example, although there is often more than one “right way” to pronounce words).

The tagline is also a reference to the location of Devanagari in a grid. Users of Hindi2.com have the option to view documents in various formats.

• One way is grammatically: sentence-by-sentence (with point-and-click audio of choice). That is where the grid becomes an option.
• 2-3 languages/scripts of choice side-by-side (see grammatical) or
• A combination of 4 in a specific grid.
  • Primary language above language learning
  • Devanagari (will require modification for some languages: MD) will alwaysbe on the right in a grid.
  • Primary script will be on left unless Devanagari, then Roman (MD is always on right)
  • When primary script is something other than Roman letters and Devanagari, Roman letters will be replaced by native script (Khmer).
  • Devanagari will remain the common phonetic script for all languages in the database
  • MD will be used to provide an educated opinion about the “right phonetic cues” for “one right phonetic pronunciation”, which will be linked to audio.