Thursday, May 10, 2012

Indian languages in roman alphabets

Have you ever paid attention to a Hindi sentence written using Roman alphabets? We see examples of them every day, in Hindi movie titles, in advertisements, SMS texts, news articles...

But I wonder, does anyone pay attention to the correctness of spellings when one writes, lets say Hindi using Roman alphabets? I guess not, and perhaps rightly so, since there is no defined standard or dictionary of such spellings.

Moreover, many regional variables too come into the picture. For example, the South Indian usage of 'th', for ex, 'Devatha', or the rural North's inability to say 'z', thus replacing it with 'j', for ex, 'Jahaaj'. And the now famous Eastern usage of 'b' instead of 'v', for ex, 'Bidya'.

Despite this, I am still for some semblance of  correctness in spelling while writing Indian languages using Roman alphabets.

I wish someone came up with a dictionary of starting with, all Hindi words. I read about the Romanlipi, but my basic issue with such scripts is that they use non-standard symbols and alphabets, for ex, 'ña', 'üs°', etc...which will require a great deal of training.

Use existing alphabets and keep it simple.

Koi meri sunega?






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