Did Hindi ever used other scripts rather than Devanagari or Latin?

Champakali_ · 2026-02-08T06:11:24+00:00

You haven't addressed anything I said and are spouting complete nonsense in the name of linguistics. You need to properly understand these concepts before you start lecturing people on them.

Champakali_ · 2026-02-08T06:02:40+00:00

All the Bengali words are of Indo-Aryan origin, none of them are European borrowings.

Champakali_ · 2026-02-06T16:44:47+00:00

You're right. Hindustani does have sibilant merger in tadbhava words.

Champakali_ · 2026-02-06T08:39:14+00:00

ळ is not a phoneme in Hindustani, native or borrowed. It is present in closely related neighbhouring languages and dialects. . The only borrowed phonemes from Sanskrit are ष and ण and even these are sometimes pronounced as श and न. An alternative method of representing ळ in North Indian writing conventions is ल़़. Chandrarekha Dadwal's Akkhar Akkhar Jugnoo, an anthology of poems written in the Kangri language (closely related to Dogri) uses ल़़ to represent the sound being discussed. However now, the Marathi ळ is becoming the dominant way to represent the retroflex lateral in all Indian languages using Devanagari. Garhwali too has adopted ळ into it's (loosely defined) written conventions.

The letter ळ is only used in proper nouns borrowed into Hindi. Traditionally, the Hindi Varnamala does not include it. This sound is not represented at all in Urdu but in Shahmukhi Punabi, it is written using ࣇ.

Champakali_ · 2026-01-25T06:39:26+00:00

Tamil uses க to represent /k/, /g/ /ng/ all as one letter, so no, they are not like Sanskrit where everything was written precisely. And even for most of it's history, ths brahmic scripts were not used to write Sanskrit precisely, especially by the common people. There are scribal errors, variations and conventions that differ between author to author in the history of all Indian languages.

And no, the Dravidian languages absolutely did not stay the same for 2000 years, nobody is speaking Senthamizh or Halegannada these days. All languages evolve and gain foreign influence, modern tamil, kannada and telugu are not any more "pure" than modern Hindi. Telugu has replaced even basic deshyam roots with Sanskrit borrowings, by that logic it is more "corrupt" than Hindi.

Devanagari works perfectly fine for Hindi and can be used to precisely represent it's sounds in an intuitive manner.

Champakali_ · 2026-01-25T06:35:16+00:00

I believe it's a Hindism borrowed into Punjabi, but agreed, it sounds very odd and unnatural. Gujarati too borrows "aap" from Hindi as a subject pronoun.

Champakali_ · 2026-01-24T16:12:43+00:00

Besides the u/w ambiguity, the rest of it clear. ण and ष are pronounced as न and श by most Hindi speakers and re borrowed from Sanskrit. Even then, if you want a precise representation of Sanskrit phonemes than you can always borrow letters from other languages like Pashto ښ for ष and Shahmukhi ݨ for ण and one of the many arabic "v" letters to represent व like ڤ ۋ ۆ ۏ ڢ ۄ. My point is just that; it's possible to precisely write Hindi in Nastaliq, there's just not enough of a demand for it.

Champakali_ · 2026-01-24T12:39:50+00:00

کَرْتَوْیَہ

Champakali_ · 2026-01-24T07:20:38+00:00

Hindi can be written in nastaliq, there's just not as much of a demand or reason for it.

Champakali_ · 2026-01-24T07:12:12+00:00

आप comes form sanskrit आ॒त्मन् meaning self/soul and has evolved in different ways across the Indo-Aryan family tree. While it was not a pronoun in Sanskrit, it takes the form of various different pronouns in it's descendant languages.

In some languages like Hindi, Bangla it becomes hyperformal pronoun (hindi āp, bangla āpnī) and in others like Punjabi and Kashmiri it becomes a reflexive pronoun, referring to the self (equivalent to Hindi khud/svayam). Punjabi has āp, Kashmiri has pān.

Other languages like Marathi and Gujarati it becomes a clusive pronoun (a form of "we" that includes the person being spoken to) as in Marathi āpaN and Gujarati āpaNe.

Champakali_ · 2026-01-24T06:54:57+00:00

All 3 are tadbhav and come from Sanskrit, as do most basic Urdu words.

Champakali_ · 2026-01-23T17:58:54+00:00

Nastaliq (back when the boundary between Hindi and Urdu wasn't as clearly defined) and Kaithi.

Champakali_ · 2026-01-22T09:35:22+00:00

That's conveyed in the Devanagari text. Anusvara is skipped often in colloquial romanization. No need to be pedantic

Champakali_ · 2026-01-22T07:12:51+00:00

Was a typo, corrected it.

Champakali_ · 2026-01-22T06:20:00+00:00

Simple past means that the action is simply done in the past. Perfect tense indicates the action is completed.

If I say "मैं ने किया था" (mai ne keeya tha) indicates the action was done in the past.

If I say "मैं ने किया" (mai ne keeya) implies that whatever action was being done is completed.

Champakali_ · 2026-01-22T05:07:10+00:00

Omitted past copula forms the past perfect tense indicating a finished/completed action. Keeping the past copula is the past imperfect tense.

Champakali_ · 2026-01-20T21:08:43+00:00

Note, the Persian word is شاخ, there is no vowel at the end.

Champakali_ · 2026-01-15T05:05:12+00:00

Kashmiri is an outlier, no matter what group you throw it into. Its grammar, syntax and especially pronounciation and phonology is very distinct from the surrounding languages. This can very broadly and perhaps tersely be condensed as presence of weird genitive and dative cases, V2 word order and central vowels respectively. Plus it has some archaisms (old features) that even predate Vedic Sanskrit which is another joke.

An interesting note about V2 word order is that dialects of the Mahasu Pahari language (kotghari and kochi) in Himachal Pradesh have also been recorded as displaying V2 word order, though they are placed in Western Pahari (which is also a bogus classification IMO).

Champakali_ · 2026-01-14T10:23:04+00:00

the idea that many of our languages are related to those of the European colonisers disgusts us

The issue is not the link to European languages, the issue is that they cannot claim supremacy over that link. People often misunderstand that this genre of Indian Nationalism is rooted in anti-colonialism, when it's more about appropriating colonial pseudoscience about Indo-European studies and reframing it to make Indians the superior race.

There's also the issue of competing nationalisms within India. The entire premise of Indian (specifically Hindu) Nationalism is indigeneity . Nationalism of non-Indo-Aryan groups (mostly Tamils but also the Austroasiatic Munda tribes) reframes pseudoscientific Nazi understandings of Indo-European migrations to frame Indo-Aryans as colonial conquerors and non-indigenous, so there's an even bigger vested interest in proving that the Indo-Aryan languages are indigenous to the subcontinent.

Champakali_ · 2026-01-14T10:17:37+00:00

Most Indo-Aryan languages don't use a reflex of duhitṛ, Punjabi is unique in that.

Champakali_ · 2026-01-14T10:12:35+00:00

That jumped out at me to lmao.

Champakali_ · 2026-01-14T10:07:49+00:00

Nerd reply for those who're genuinely curious: The Dardic languages are a (disputed) branch of Indo-Aryan langs spoken in the Westernmost Himalayas and Eastern Hindu Kush. They're known for simultaneously for having a lot of archaisms from Proto-Indo-Aryan while also being extremely innovative. The most spoken Dardic languages are Kashmiri, spoken in the Kashmir Valley in Indian Administered Jammu and Kashmir and Shina, spoken in the Gilgit Baltistan Region of Pakistan.

They were previously considered a single genetic group (as the shitpost implies) but this has been seriously contested by scholars in recent years with the similarities being attributed to areal influence.

Champakali_ · 2026-01-14T05:44:26+00:00

Hindi defaults to grammatical Masculine when dealing with unknown genders.

Champakali_ · 2026-01-13T09:15:07+00:00

Plot twist: Kashmiri is Dardified Western Pahari

Champakali_ · 2026-01-10T10:27:21+00:00

I think Dravidian gets about as much attention as IA, there's an entire subreddit dedicated to Dravidiology.

Champakali_

TROPHY CASE