{"id":2796,"date":"2003-08-12T13:38:48","date_gmt":"2003-08-12T08:08:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alpha.ravikiran.com\/blog\/2003\/08\/12\/word-play\/"},"modified":"2003-08-12T13:38:48","modified_gmt":"2003-08-12T08:08:48","slug":"word-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/vintage\/200308\/word-play\/","title":{"rendered":"Word play"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Apropos of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rediff.com\/news\/2003\/aug\/07rajeev.htm\">this<\/a> column by Rajeev Srinivasan where he basically says that all Hindi speakers pronounce their Sanskrit-derived words wrongly, I have three random thoughts.<\/p>\n<p>Mostly I am a language descriptivist, i.e. I believe that to learn the meaning or pronounciation of a word, you have to hear native speakers use it and not derive it through arcane rules of grammer or by looking at how the word originated. <br \/>But then I have this nagging feeling that <i>Sanskrit<\/i> words should follow different rules. Besides, I&#8217;ve lived in Lucknow and seen &#8220;It&#8217;s your language too. You too should learn to speak it&#8221; (when a North Indian is confronted with a South Indian who doesn&#8217;t know the language) change to &#8220;It&#8217;s my language. The way I pronounce it <i>is<\/i> Hindi.&#8221; when faced with a Tambram co?recting his Sanskrit derived word.<\/p>\n<p>When a North Indian wants to simplify Hindi, he wants heavy Sanskrit-laden words to be taken out and &#8220;simpler&#8221; Urdu words to be used instead (This is not to say that all Urdu words are simpler, but many are) But a South Indian is more likely to understand Sanskrit derived words.<\/p>\n<p>One thing that always irritates me is the &#8220;mispronounciation&#8221; of <i>Jnya<\/i> by North Indians (i.e. everyone north of Karnataka) They always pronounce it <i>gya<\/i> (as in gyaan) and they won&#8217;t listen when I correct them. <\/p>\n<p>Finally, here&#8217;s a quiz for  <i>Examined Life<\/i> readers. Give the Ancient Greek equivalent of Jnya which means the same thing. It is a common part of many words &#8211; pretty workoutable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apropos of this column by Rajeev Srinivasan where he basically says that all Hindi speakers pronounce their Sanskrit-derived words wrongly, I have three random thoughts. Mostly I am a language descriptivist, i.e. I believe that to learn the meaning or pronounciation of a word, you have to hear native speakers use it and not derive [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2796"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2796\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}