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24 October 2007

also: PIZZAQ! -- who needs multisubj yb? we can learn how to pronounce any Devanagari lingo all by ourselves!

or just click HERE. Make sure your MUTE is OFF.

PIZZAQ! 1 slice, no toppings. One of the keys on the keyboard will make a bloke with a very high-class uptown Brit professor voice speak English for about 15 seconds. WHICH KEY? and WHAT DOES HE SAY?

This is the pronunciation / sound key to these languages: Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, and the ancient language of the sacred Hindu texts, Sanskrit.

All these languages belong to the Indo-European language family, so their vocabulary and grammar are cousins to nearly all the languages of Europe and the Euro-colonized New World -- Romance languages, Greek, Slavic, Germanic/Teutonic languages, Gaelic/Celtic, Scandinavian languages.

Actually these lingos are from the subfamily called Indo-Aryan. From Wikipedia:

Marathi is primarily spoken in Maharashtra and parts of neighboring states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Goa, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh,

[where multisubj yb practices law and is hiding from Vleeptron, and won't even tell us what modern Subcontinental lingo he speaks ...]

union-territories of Daman-diu and Dadra Nagar Haveli. The cities of Baroda, Surat, Ahmedabad and entire South Gujarat (Gujarat) Belgaum, Hubli, Dharwad, Gulbarga, Bidar (Karnataka) Indore,Gwalior (Madhya Pradesh) Hyderabad (Andhra Pradesh) and Tanjore (Tamil Nadu) each have sizable Marathi-speaking communities. Marathi is also spoken by Maharashtrian émigrés worldwide, in USA, UAE, South Africa, Singapore, Germany, UK, Australia & New Zealand.[3] The Ethnologue states that Marathi is even spoken in Israel and Mauritius.

They all sprang from an extinct language, Proto-Indo-European (PIE), whose ancient speakers probably (we know from tracing back and comparing vocabularies about plants, animals and weather) lived around the Black Sea. Estimates of when PIE flourished as a spoken language range from 4000 to 10000 BCE.

I don't know what Proto-Indo-European food was like. There are today no Proto-Indo-European restaurants.

multisubj yb
, who originally advertised that he lived in Afghanistan, but now informs us that he lives in India, left some very interesting comments about Sanskrit and the Bhagavad Gita and the Caste System and religious systems and ...

But now he has deserted Vleeptron, and seems to have nothing more to tell us about all these things.

Which is a pity, because we are Dumb As Rocks about all these things. He is in India and knows all the answers, we are in the USA and know about four things that are good to eat at the India Palace Restaurant on Main Street. (The Chef is Sikh.)

So lacking multisubj yb's assistance -- which we will gladly pay for in good, honest Pizza (transportation and shipping not included) -- we will just keep ignorantly stumbling and bumbling and blundering along in matters of religion and language, and cuisine, and maybe politics and culture, in the Subcontinent.

Meanwhile, go to this website, find the Push and Pronounce keyboard, and listen to the spoken sounds (male voice) of the lingos written in the Devanagari alphabet.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is great! If you got onto a sight like Livemocha.com (free language learning) you could practice writing, take lessons and talk to each other all at the same time!

Vleeptron Dude said...

Thanks! And from now on, obey the First Law of Vleeptron!

NO ANONYMOUS DRIVEBY COMMENTS!

Anonymous said...

OK, I can speak fluent high and low german (my home dialect of Bärndütsch is almost a language in itself)french, italian (not so fluent), spanish (sort of), a tad bit of portugese and japanese (but only if you ask me on the same day i learnt it), i can swear in finnish, understand dutch, had some lessons in russian that i forgot, learned the hebrew aflebet and now Hindi. some of the soundfiles on the site do not work btw. Goodness Gracous Me, are you planning on spending your Golden Years in Goa ???

ybr (alias ybrao a donkey) said...

Saw that you have written here that I have deserted. Not.

The problem is, I have too heavy a work load with me, which I have only partly finished and things are in different stages of completion.

In my environment I do not have much informal-English-speaking/writing environment, particularly the American model. Hence, I find it somewhat difficult to understand your Mass. Boston idioms and phrases. I am trying to acclamitise and familiarise myself with your writing style.

You have asked about Panini (pr: Paan`ini). I furnish below a link to the GanikaAsht`aadhyaayi. http://www.taralabalu.org/panini/greetings.htm.
I have a vague remembrance of having used the above software for sometime in my home P.C., but cannot vouchesafe. Right now I am not using.

Paan`ini's book, I feel is more useful to regular, dedicated students and scholars of Sanskrits, rather than amateurs like us. For our functional working, the Sanskrit English Dictionary available at University of Chicago is extremely useful. Here is its link: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/romadict.pl?query=dyava&display=simple&table=macdonell.
Vocabulary is like bricks needed to construct a building. Grammar is its do's and don'ts. For our purpose even an elementary school grammar may be sufficient instead of Paan`ini's Asht`aadhyaayi. Many Sanskrit Online teaching sites can be found on internet.

Reading Sanskrit texts available on Net, presented in Roman Script with English translations side by side, will help us immensely to understand most Sanskrit verses. I am not sure whether you or your readers have such deep interest in studying Sanskrit books.
With regards.

About my country name: Afghanistan. It is an inadvertant error in clicking. The popup
"edit country" window available in Profile editing led to the mistake. It is the first name in the country list of the window, there seems to have been some default selection of the first item when I was searching for "India" which is alphabetically beside Iceland, Ireland etc. Anyway, thank you for declaring me as a deserter.