What's the main native language in these countries?

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Re: What's the main native language in these countries?

Postby Osias » 2016-10-25, 22:59

Or maybe still Sanskrit? Like modern Greek is still 'Greek'?
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Re: What's the main native language in these countries?

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-10-26, 0:00

No, because the Indo-Aryan languages are way more diverse than Greek is and spoken over a much, much bigger area, probably more comparable in size to Western Europe or something. Greece is about the same size as just one of the Indian states. ;)

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Re: What's the main native language in these countries?

Postby Osias » 2016-10-29, 17:21

:hmm:
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Re: What's the main native language in these countries?

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-10-29, 18:04

Well, you know how many languages are spoken in Brazil, and India isn't that much smaller in terms of land area. :P (And it's a hell of a lot bigger in terms of population!).

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Re: What's the main native language in these countries?

Postby Osias » 2016-10-29, 18:17

Brazil is not a good comparison. Maybe 99% of the people never see the other languages. It's a situation worse than Native American languages from USA.

I think we can say Latin and Romance languages.
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Re: What's the main native language in these countries?

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-10-29, 18:36

Yeah, it's pretty much like them, I think. They can be mutually intelligible with some effort and have undergone language contact for a long time, but middle-class people who know one don't necessarily try to learn any others and use English to communicate with other Indians instead. Sanskrit is also like Latin: It's evolved into a bunch of languages, but it's used like a liturgical language, and there are Sanskrit revival movements (there are "Sanskrit villages") kind of like how there are Latin revival movements.

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Re: What's the main native language in these countries?

Postby Saim » 2016-10-29, 18:43

vijayjohn wrote:Or Rekhta and Hindvi or whatever. It's apparently gone by a lot of different names over time.


The thing with Hindi, Hindvi and Hindustani is that they're still imperialistic because Hind and Hindustan mean "India". I think that's part of the reason why we're seeing so much use of the odious expression regional languages for everything that isn't Hindi; it's the only major Indian language whose name isn't associated with a particular region or ethnic group.

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Re: What's the main native language in these countries?

Postby linguoboy » 2016-10-29, 20:00

How do you say "Hindi Belt" in Hindi? Do speakers just use the English term?
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Re: What's the main native language in these countries?

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-10-29, 20:07

No, they assume the entirety of India is the Hindi belt. :twisted: :lol:

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Re: What's the main native language in these countries?

Postby Saim » 2016-10-30, 8:32

linguoboy wrote:How do you say "Hindi Belt" in Hindi? Do speakers just use the English term?


Not sure, but using Google Translate I've come up with the terms हिंदी बेल्ट (1350 Google hits) and हिंदी भाषी क्षेत्र (8250) hits. That said, I think it's likely that in colloquial Hindustani, at least as spoken by English-educated people, the former term is more used.

For Urdu ہندی بیلٹ comes up with 321 results. One of the sites is a BBC Urdu page, with this description of the term:

ہندوستان میں جس علاقے کو ’ہندی بیلٹ‘ کا نام دیا جاتا ہے وہ دہلی سے لے کر مشرق میں بنگال کی سرحد ت واقع ہے۔

In India the area ranging from Delhi to the border with Bengal in the east is know as the 'Hindi belt'.

I find the term Hindi belt problematic as well because it has dozens of other languages, most of which will probably be marginal by the turn of the century due to shift to Hindi. :(
Last edited by Saim on 2016-10-30, 15:35, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: What's the main native language in these countries?

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-10-30, 13:23

क्षेत्र reminds me of the Sanskrit loanword in Malayalam for 'temple'. :lol: (It also reminds me of the Malayalam word for "geometry," a Sanskrit noun compound literally meaning 'temple math').

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Re: What's the main native language in these countries?

Postby Nooj » 2016-11-04, 12:33

Is it really the case that Sanskrit evolved into the other languages? I thought Sanskrit was just one Indo-Aryan language among others, and the ones people still speak now descended from Prakrits, other Indo-Aryan language varieties.

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Re: What's the main native language in these countries?

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-11-04, 14:40

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: Well, essentially, my understanding of this is as follows: The Indo-Aryan languages can be divided into three stages, namely Old Indo-Aryan, Middle Indo-Aryan, and New Indo-Aryan. Middle Indo-Aryan is descended from Old Indo-Aryan; New Indo-Aryan is descended from Middle Indo-Aryan. Thus, all Indo-Aryan languages are ultimately descended from Old Indo-Aryan, and specifically from Vedic Sanskrit, the language in which the Vedas were orally preserved for hundreds of years before finally being written down. However, "Sanskrit" is normally used in the linguistic literature to mean not this but Classical Sanskrit, which basically started out as a written variant of Vedic Sanskrit (making Classical Sanskrit also a variety of Old Indo-Aryan) but since then has been heavily influenced by other vernacular languages, much like Classical Latin. Vedic Sanskrit also split up into various dialects that became the Middle Indo-Aryan languages, which eventually evolved into the New Indo-Aryan languages. Prakrits are a subset of the Middle Indo-Aryan languages that were used for writing literature beginning with the Edicts of Ashoka; many, but not all, New Indo-Aryan languages are descended from Prakrits.


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