Talk:Hindustani orthography

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some discussion of the ways in which Hindi written in Devanagari differs from sanskrit should be added here. E.g. loss of inherent vowel, dotted letters, diacritics for English loan words. Grover cleveland (talk) 19:03, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Grover cleveland What do you mean by loss of inherent vowel? Most sources for beginner learners of Hindi say the letters all imply a vowel unless they're joined as a ligature? Though there's some very long debates on the Duolingo forums about whether this is accurate. Irtapil (talk) 16:16, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Purpose of this article

Following a comment by Fowler&fowler in a discussion about the dab Hindustani, I wonder what the purpose of this article is. Disregarding for the moment the dispute about whether "Hindustani" or "Hindi–Urdu" is the appropriate label for the language with two distinct standardized high registers, this article is obviously a standalone created from what properly should be a section of Hindustani language/Hindi–Urdu. I have two points here:

1. Hindustani language already has a section called Writing system, and the article is not really large enough to justify a WP:size split for that section. Merge?
2. In the current form, the article simply juxtaposes the Perso-Arabic and Devanagri writing systems, without relating one to the other. An interested reader will find much better information in Urdu alphabet and Devanagari. This article does not have additional informative value.

Since Hindustani language/Hindi–Urdu is about the structural core of the language, wouldn't it be much more enlightening for readers to tabulate a synopsis of how the sounds of the language are mapped into the Perso-Arabic and Devanagari scripts? Including a note about the sounds which are commonly associated with only one of the literary registers, and notoriously create problems for speakers who are not familiar with that register. Sources for this won't be hard to find.

Pinging @Fowler&fowler, Kwamikagami, Anupam, Kautilya3, Uanfala, Fylindfotberserk, and Irtapil: ideas/comments? –Austronesier (talk) 11:10, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Austronesier I like that idea particularly "Including a note about the sounds which are commonly associated with only one of the literary registers, and notoriously create problems for speakers who are not familiar with that register." I think there's some issues with sources being a bit idealised though. There's long debates on Duolingo Hindi forums about whether न ण and a third one are actually different... But I can't hear the difference between ڈ د ٹ ت so who knows. Irtapil (talk) 16:24, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

• Support. It's a little weird to have an orthography article for a language that has two competing orthographies. Even Serbian orthography doesn't do this (though in that case one of the orthographies is Latin, and the correspondence is one to one, both of which make it simpler for our audience). As you say, this is really only interesting in the intersection of Nastaliq and Nagari, which this article currently doesn't do. So I'd propose covering the minutia in the separate articles (and maybe move Urdu alphabet to 'Urdu orthography'? or does the Urdu article cover that well enough?), and develop the correspondences in the Hindustani article. Unless it turns out there's enough to split it off, in which case this article needs to be rewritten, and maybe renamed to 'Correspondence of Urdu and Hindi orthographies' or something. — kwami (talk) 11:22, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
• I agree that this content is better covered in the main article. Just a note re Urdu alphabet: a title like Urdu orthography would suggest the article is only about Urdu, whereas the term Urdu alphabet has a wider scope covering its use in some other regional languages of Pakistan. – Uanfala (talk) 11:41, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
• Thanks for pinging me here User:Austronesier. I personally think that this article has the potential to be expanded to discuss all of the scripts that have been used to write Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu); some of these may be historical scripts, such as Kaithi, that are no longer commonly used today. If it is decided that this article be merged back into Hindustani language#Writing system, it might be useful to add this information there. I hope this helps. With regards, Anupam^Talk 01:55, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Austronesier The Urdu alphabet article currently only covers Urdu. The only other language I know if using that alphabet without additions is Punjabi... But that's kind of multiple languages, that would get complicated too complicated to be within the scope. Should the Urdu alphabet page include closely related alphabets like Sindhi? Irtapil (talk) 12:24, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

I was about to say merge "Hindustani orthography" into Hindustani, but I much prefer the idea from Anupam "all of the scripts that have been used to write Hindustani" that would be a very interesting and worthwhile article. Could merge it into a parent article to reduce redundancy then move it back out if / when it gets too big? Irtapil (talk) 16:11, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

One thing worth including, that the wiki pages on Urdu all seem to be lacking, is the Latin alphabet as used by native speakers. Hindi and Urdu are very frequently written in Latin characters, but most of the transliterations we have here on Wikipedia bare no resemblance to those that are actually used to communicate in the language. The formal academic English and transliterations are worthwhile for communicating the pronunciation to English speakers, but there's a whole third writing system used to actually communicate in Urdu and Hindi that's not covered well. When I come across examples of Urdu being used online, it's in the Latin alphabet more than half of the time, and never features things like ā, and I have never seen ' in the middle of a word. There's a brief note about written mutual intelligibility but not much detail in terms of usual transliterations etc.

• Roman Urdu has just one example text, no table, and still focuses on formal transliterations.
• The article Devanagari transliteration is very extensive adding Urdu to that would not be appropriate, but possibly some of that content could be adapted or some of those references might be useful?
• There's an article for Arabic that is kind of in the direction I'm talking about Arabic Chat Alphabet. But the Urdu and Hindi languages use Latin even more extensively (probably because they are even harder to type and even less well supported by computers), and for Urdu / Hindi it's a bit less... weird, no numerals and usually no mixed caps, since in Urdu ط sounds like ت and ع is often silent etc. (so no need to spell things with 3 or 7).

Irtapil (talk) 16:35, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Schwa deletion

Do the pronunciations in the section about schwa deletion sound kind of like Sanskrit? "For instance, राम is Rām (incorrect: Rāma), रचना is Rachnā (incorrect: Rachanā), वेद is Véd (incorrect: Véda) and नमकीन is Namkeen (incorrect Namakeena)." Or do they just sound like yoga enthusiasts who don't speak Hindi? Irtapil (talk) 06:12, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

I think these explanations make sense, and largely agree with what R.S McGregor describes in his Outline of Hindi Grammar, p. xxiv–xxv. –Austronesier (talk) 11:00, 28 April 2020 (UTC)