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Why isn’t Hindi a "popular" language? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Lugubert Heptaglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6661 days ago 186 posts - 235 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, Danish, Norwegian, EnglishC2, German, Dutch, French Studies: Mandarin, Hindi | Message 9 of 197 13 February 2006 at 7:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
Usually? Hindi/Urdu is even worse than German in heaping umpteen verbs at the end, like four of them.
Agreed, but you focus on isolated words. Words aren't that difficult to learn, in fact we learn new words all the time in our own languages. But what makes a language difficult to learn, the way I perceive it, is differences in grammar. Linas mentioned a few such problems; you should already have noticed the globally rather rare ergative construction (-ne). And don't get me started on compound verbs... I know no language other than modern Indian ones featuring anything like it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Linas Octoglot Senior Member Lithuania Joined 6706 days ago 253 posts - 279 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Lithuanian*, Russian, Latvian, French, English, German, Spanish, Polish Studies: Slovenian, Greek, Hungarian, Arabic (Written), Portuguese | Message 10 of 197 14 February 2006 at 12:53am | IP Logged | |||||
In fact ergative construction exists in Basque, Georgian and Tibetan. Compound verbs abound in Uzbek, Korean and Japanese. Some Hindi constructions are very like Uzbek. BTW, if someone would like to start Indic languages, maybe Gujarati would be more appropriate, it is a little bit simpler than Hindi. Yet Gujarati has only 40 mln. speakers and still less learning materials than Hindi. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| onebir Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6957 days ago 484 posts - 502 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 11 of 197 20 December 2006 at 5:42am | IP Logged | |||||
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What's an ergative construction? (I've tried googling for it, but all I get is academic papers that assume you know what it is...)
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| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6562 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 12 of 197 20 December 2006 at 6:53am | IP Logged | |||||
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I believe that in ergative languages, intransitive verbs ("I eat" as opposed to "I eat pudding") treat the agent ("I") as a direct object instead of a subject. It sounds weird, but not that weird.
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| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 6938 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 13 of 197 20 December 2006 at 7:15am | IP Logged | |||||
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Ergative constructions are in fact very common in a number of language families around the world, and even within Indo-European languages. Most Iranian languages, with the exception of Persian, are ergative. The way ergativity functions varies from language to language, but in Kurmanji Kurdish, it affects the past tenses (or more technically, all the verb tenses made from the past stem) of transitive verbs only. To show how it works, here's an example using English words.
In a non-ergative language, to change the present-tense sentence "I see her" into the past, we just change the tense of the verb, from "see" to "saw", and the case of both "I" and "her" remain the same. So we get "I saw her". In Kurmanji, which is ergative, the case of the subject and object reverse, and the verb takes on the ending not of the subject but rather of the object, so putting "I see her" into the past tense would be "Me saw she", with "saw" taking the third-person personal ending to agree with the object rather than the subject. (In the present tense, the verb is conjugated according to the subject.) To illustrate, this sentence in the perfect tense would be "Me has seen she". Kurmanji: "Ez wê dibînim" becomes "Min ew dît" Truly mind-boggling, and very difficult to get accustomed to, especially as it only applies to transitive verbs, so intransitive verbs like "go" are not subject to ergativity. "I go" becomes simply "I went" in the past. Edited by daristani on 20 December 2006 at 7:36am 11 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| onebir Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6957 days ago 484 posts - 502 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 14 of 197 20 December 2006 at 9:39am | IP Logged | |||||
I can believe it! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Eriol Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6660 days ago 118 posts - 130 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Portuguese | Message 15 of 197 20 December 2006 at 11:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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If a languagelearner cares about economic factors and the future of the language, wouldn't it make more sense to focus on the Urdu variety and the modified arabic script it uses? To me it seems like the arabic and latin scripts are the only two writing systems that are growing in importance at the moment. I know absolutely nothing about the language situation in Pakistan, so please tell me if I'm completely wrong.
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6950 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 16 of 197 20 December 2006 at 11:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't get how the importance of a language is tied to the script that it uses.
On the other hand, Urdu and Hindi are quite close so Urdu could be a useful alternative for Hindi if all that you're after is to know how to communicate with Pakistanis and many Indians. I still don't see how Urdu's use of the modified Arabic script would be a compelling reason to take on Urdu over Hindi (unless, of course you already have learned Arabic script through previous study.) According to my coworker from Pakistan, colloquial Hindi and colloquial Urdu are close enough that people on both sides of the border can talk with each other quite easily. He noted that the problems arise when you use a lot of slang, try to take in Hindi news broadcasts with an Urdu background (and vice-versa -the respective governments and media tend to use the languages in ways that accentuate the differences) and delve into old writings about Hinduism (much of the vocabulary about Hinduism is specific to Hindi and unknown to native Urdu speakers who are often Muslim.) 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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