Nerd Nite, Part I
Apr. 3rd, 2010 07:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebThanks to Facebook, I learned that a friend was going to Nerd Nite (spelled "nerdnite" in Boston/Cambridge), a monthly event I'd never before heard of. The bad part is we meet in a bar (drinking, noise) in downtown (bad parking). The good part is that there are three lectures.
This week's first lecture was "Indian Language Politics, or How Gandhi Pissed Off Almost Everyone" by Libby Bowers.
Here's what I used to know about language in India: They speak Hindi.
Then, additional languages became available at the college where I work, and so I did some administrative stuff so that if you took one of these languages, it would count toward your foreign language requirement. And that is how I learned that Urdu, Tamil, and Telugu are also spoken in India.
I learned a lot more at Nerd Nite.
India has no national languages and two official languages: Hindi and English. English was only going to be transitionally official, but they keep extending its official status.
There are 22 "scheduled" languages. These are the languages that are very commonly spoken. But there are hundreds of languages.
And the languages are not all closely related, either. Many languages are descended from Sanskrit, especially in the North. (Sanskrit itself is rarely used, mostly for religious purposes, perhaps like Latin.) Many other languages are from a completely different family, Dravidian, especially in the south.
The languages don't even use the same script. The speaker showed us two major ones: one looked unfamiliar to me, the other looked like Arabic to me.
Our speaker really liked the Hindustani movement. This is where some people wanted to work with Hindi and Urdu, which are very similar but use different scripts, and remove the Sanskrit-based words in Hindi and the Persian-based words in Urdu to make one common language, but this language would be written in both scripts.
Compromise was not easy and apparently Gandhi did not help matters at one of these language conferences when he called the new language "Hindi Hindistani" and made it perfectly clear that he had no clue about the issues at hand and probably didn't care either. Continuing conflict lead to separation, which made the remaining Urdu speakers feel (according to our speaker), "Oh crap! Not only are we a smaller minority now, our language is associated with the enemy of our country [Pakistan]."
Our speaker said that Hindi and Urdu used to be very similar, but in Pakistan, more Arabic vocabulary has been introduced. (Note: where I work, Hindi and Urdu are considered so similar that they often meet together and you cannot get credit for taking both. I won't claim, however, that there is nothing backward about Indian language teaching in Texas.)
The state boundaries in India coincide with natural language boundaries. So each state is associated with a local language. And you can also learn the official languages, which are handy for many types of jobs. Now although Urdu is the sixth-most-spoken language in India, the speakers are not concentrated enough to have a state or even schools.
At the end, I told my friend, "Now that I have a clue, I'm wondering what languages your family speaks." Punjabi and English, plus she learned Hindi in school, as a foreign language. Her family lives in Punjab.
And then I did a tiny amount of research on Punjabi and Punjab. Punjabi is Indo-Aryan, like Sanskrit. It is the 13th most widely spoken language in the world. I can't tell which script is used--maybe both (or more than two). Punjab is in northwestern India, and part of it is in what is now Pakistan.
Since I hang with geeks, I did a tiny amount of research about Banagalore, the Silicon Valley of India. This is in southern India in the state of Karnataka where Kannada, a Dravidian language, is the official language.
Quotes of the Day - I recently attended a required class on customer service where I heard a few fun quotes.
"You may have seen me in the hallway and thought, 'I'd like to buy that guy lunch. Or a frosty or something.' And you can."
"We are not authorities on the subject. No, no. We are just guides."
"Empathize! As long as you're not a sociopath, you can do this!"
This week's first lecture was "Indian Language Politics, or How Gandhi Pissed Off Almost Everyone" by Libby Bowers.
Here's what I used to know about language in India: They speak Hindi.
Then, additional languages became available at the college where I work, and so I did some administrative stuff so that if you took one of these languages, it would count toward your foreign language requirement. And that is how I learned that Urdu, Tamil, and Telugu are also spoken in India.
I learned a lot more at Nerd Nite.
India has no national languages and two official languages: Hindi and English. English was only going to be transitionally official, but they keep extending its official status.
There are 22 "scheduled" languages. These are the languages that are very commonly spoken. But there are hundreds of languages.
And the languages are not all closely related, either. Many languages are descended from Sanskrit, especially in the North. (Sanskrit itself is rarely used, mostly for religious purposes, perhaps like Latin.) Many other languages are from a completely different family, Dravidian, especially in the south.
The languages don't even use the same script. The speaker showed us two major ones: one looked unfamiliar to me, the other looked like Arabic to me.
Our speaker really liked the Hindustani movement. This is where some people wanted to work with Hindi and Urdu, which are very similar but use different scripts, and remove the Sanskrit-based words in Hindi and the Persian-based words in Urdu to make one common language, but this language would be written in both scripts.
Compromise was not easy and apparently Gandhi did not help matters at one of these language conferences when he called the new language "Hindi Hindistani" and made it perfectly clear that he had no clue about the issues at hand and probably didn't care either. Continuing conflict lead to separation, which made the remaining Urdu speakers feel (according to our speaker), "Oh crap! Not only are we a smaller minority now, our language is associated with the enemy of our country [Pakistan]."
Our speaker said that Hindi and Urdu used to be very similar, but in Pakistan, more Arabic vocabulary has been introduced. (Note: where I work, Hindi and Urdu are considered so similar that they often meet together and you cannot get credit for taking both. I won't claim, however, that there is nothing backward about Indian language teaching in Texas.)
The state boundaries in India coincide with natural language boundaries. So each state is associated with a local language. And you can also learn the official languages, which are handy for many types of jobs. Now although Urdu is the sixth-most-spoken language in India, the speakers are not concentrated enough to have a state or even schools.
At the end, I told my friend, "Now that I have a clue, I'm wondering what languages your family speaks." Punjabi and English, plus she learned Hindi in school, as a foreign language. Her family lives in Punjab.
And then I did a tiny amount of research on Punjabi and Punjab. Punjabi is Indo-Aryan, like Sanskrit. It is the 13th most widely spoken language in the world. I can't tell which script is used--maybe both (or more than two). Punjab is in northwestern India, and part of it is in what is now Pakistan.
Since I hang with geeks, I did a tiny amount of research about Banagalore, the Silicon Valley of India. This is in southern India in the state of Karnataka where Kannada, a Dravidian language, is the official language.
Quotes of the Day - I recently attended a required class on customer service where I heard a few fun quotes.
"You may have seen me in the hallway and thought, 'I'd like to buy that guy lunch. Or a frosty or something.' And you can."
"We are not authorities on the subject. No, no. We are just guides."
"Empathize! As long as you're not a sociopath, you can do this!"