linguoboy wrote:That's pretty much the norm outside of Europe and much of North America, where you still have real dialect continua. Europe is anomalous in the way that it has created a raft of "minority languages" with standardised forms and killed off most of its true local dialects.
Don't the South Slavic languages still form a continuum, though? I still falsely remember that the languages/dialects of Italy would, too, but IpseDixit once said it was like that 70 years ago but not anymore... no idea where I got the idea that they would from and why it still sticks in my head as the first instinct, but well.
vijayjohn wrote:I think the [l] thing may just be a mistake.
I hope that's not the case because it'd be one of the weirdest sound changes ever, and weird sound changes are cool.
mundiya wrote:Urdu uses the Perso-Arabic script, so you would need to learn that if you don't know it already. To really get a good grasp of the language you would need to know its script.
Yeah, I can read the Perso-Arabic script (albeit much slower than Latin or Cyrillic). The fact that short vowels are generally not written of course means having to look up words a lot, but that seems much easier than learning an entirely new script whose characters I can't even tell apart from one another most of the time.
mundiya wrote:Devanagari is considered one of the easiest scripts to learn because of its phonetic nature.
Maybe, but it's completely new
to me. I mean, there are a few syllables I can recognise, but unfortunately most of them just look the same to my eyes. I'm trying to get better at differentiating its letters, but it's hard.
mundiya wrote:There is no conjunct like ळॣं in Hindi.
I know, that's why I said "hypothetical".
Oh well, I'll try to learn both Hindi and Urdu. It shouldn't be hard considering the fact that they're basically the same, and maybe learning the Urdu equivalents of things first can ease me into Hindi, if that makes sense. (I keep typoing "Hindi" as "Hindu" because my mind is already on "Urdu", but I've caught it every time... I think. That'd be one of the most embarrassing typos ever...
)