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> The language and script change every five hundred miles Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to packa
by nkoren 9y ago
> The language and script change every five hundred miles
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.
- Eire_Banshee 9y agoSo... the comment wasnt stereotypical enough?
- parthdesai 9y agoIn India, language and food, both change every 200km. When you tell this to people who haven't been to India, they usually think you are exaggerating but it's surreal how diverse India actually is.
- moultano 9y agoThe best analogy for westerners IMHO is to compare India to the EU with a stronger central government.
- screye 9y agoThat is my favorite analogy too. Easily the closest Western approximation.
- echevil 9y agoI totally believe that as it’s basically the same situation in China
- janc_ 9y agoHere in Northern Belgium, some people might be able to pinpoint your origin down to a 10-20km region. :) 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.
- reaperducer 9y ago>in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. Xenophobic much?
- mavelikara 9y agoThis usually comes up in the skilled immigration backlog discussion when someone chimes in "But we want the skilled immigrants to be diverse. That's why we have a per-country cap!"
- allpratik 9y agoSeriously, I am trying my luck in NLP with some Indian languages like Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and Tamil. The sheer number of dialects is driving me nuts. 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.
- azurezyq 9y agoChina does have very diverse dialects. But Mandarin is taught in all schools in mainland China and we treat it as standard. Also it is the unified way people from different area communicate. 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.
- _emacsomancer_ 9y agoAnd what are called "dialects" in the Chinese context are just as much dialects as French, Italian, and Romanian are "dialects" of Romance.
- jacobolus 9y agoThese mostly get called “dialects” for political reasons: the Chinese government doesn’t want to acknowledge that they are separate mutually unintelligible languages. Media in Chinese languages other than Mandarin is restricted, children are forced to use Mandarin in school, all official business is done in Mandarin, etc. There is a concerted effort to make other languages economically unviable, and generally to disempower and discourage regional / minority cultures. The grandparent poster’s experience is evidence that this strategy is working out. It is similar to the way the Chinese government assigns non-native political officials to rule each region, and severely censors any politically controversial communication/media. That is, it is yet another tool of authoritarian social control, an effort to forestall any political opposition to the central government and its unresponsive top-down decision-making process. India does not have the same kind of authoritarian governing institutions, so similar forced homogenization would not be politically viable.
- svat 9y agoFor example, when the article says: > 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.
- shrimp_emoji 9y agoWhy fetishize diversity for its own sake, especially when it's a barrier to communication? 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.
- vvillena 9y agoThe moment that happens, that language would start diverging again. You have to unify culture in order to unify language, and that doesn't sound as good anymore. 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.
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- mantas 9y agoPoint in case - proto Indo European language. It's clear most of European languages (except pre-Indo-European, like Finnish, Estonian, Basque..) have common parent language. For example, look at numbers. All those languages have awfully familiar numbers. If you speak one language, you can recognise most numbers in other languages rather easily. Yet they evolved into very different languages in different regions.
- murukesh_s 9y agoI think numbering system is a recent introduction to European languages - adopted from India in 10th century or so.. but some other words have similarity like maatha- mother, pithaa- father etc! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu–Arabic_numeral_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu–Arabic_numeral_system
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- _emacsomancer_ 9y agoThere is an actual Hindi aphorism which is similar, basically: "the language and the water change every five miles"
- HumanDrivenDev 9y ago> presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend Did you intend for that to come across as condescending?
- nkoren 9y agoYou mean to the Western mind? I've got one, so yeah I feel somewhat at liberty to make mildly self-depreciating jokes about it. Sort of the way that Woody Allen is allowed to make good-natured fun of pedophiles. Egads, that's terrible company to keep. Moving on now...
- huebnerob 9y agoThere's nothing condescending about stating that there are some world views that may be beyond our immediate rapid comprehension. I have a 'western mind' and I was not offended.
- endgame 9y agoI don't know if GP did, but I did not read it as such.
- paganel 9y ago> but I did not read it as such. The same here (granted, I'm not a "true" Westerner, as I live in Eastern Europe, but that's also West of India). Adding to the conversation, I have the same issue of trying to comprehend the linguistic craziness that the Caucasus area represents. I mean, as a language buff I'm always amazed whenever I look at this language-map of the area (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Caucasus-ethnic_en.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Caucasus...) and at the language families included in there.
- vinayms 9y ago> Nearly 50 languages are indigenous to that one region alone. Not dialects. Languages. 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.
- kamaal 9y ago>>I find it hard to process this claim. 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).
- vinayms 9y agoI am pleasantly surprised to see Kannada and Karnataka mentioned. I am a Kannadiga from Bengaluru. As for street slang of the city, don't ignore the copious amounts of Urdu loan words! As you might already know, the case with Kannada is more complex. Firstly, it has high amount of diglossia. Even with all the unnecessary, flowery Sanskrit loan words removed, the spoken form is greatly different from the written form. Next, the spoken language has many many regional variants, as with most languages in the world. Further, the spoken language varies according to social groups aka caste within the regions. One could even attempt to find variations based on economic status, aka rich to poor scale, but as an amateur linguist I don't find anything particularly noteworthy to hold such a classification, and, if anything, the variation is mostly confined to the tone of speech (not same as being tonal) and a bit of inflectional oddities rather than vocabulary. In modern times, the rich tend to use more English words which muddles the matter further. Beyond all this, there are about half a dozen languages that are identified as child languages of Kannada that are mostly associated with tribal groups living in forests and mountains. I guess this kind of diversity is expected of a language which is in continuous use for nearly two millennia. For those intrigued and interested by this, I can't give any references on the internet beyond the wikipedia page because Kannada and Karnataka are severely underrated and underrepresented in Indian historical scene. Any work of worth written in English belong to the colonial times, with 1930s being the latest. The information in this post comes from knowledge acquired by reading books published, in Kannada, by language departments of universities of the state and the literary organization, and others are from personal experiences.
- drieddust 9y agoWe have a saying in Hindi which translate into this. > " 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.
- shrikrishna 9y ago* but what doesn't change is we are Indians Literal translation doesn't work here (also one of the shortcomings of tools like Google Translate)
- wodenokoto 9y ago> Nearly 50 languages are indigenous to that one region alone. Not dialects. 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.