Talk:Languages of India/Archive 1
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There are no corresponding sounds in Indian languages to the English "th" sounds. "th" in English is used to represent two sounds: (1) an unvoiced dental fricative (as in "thin") and (2) a voiced dental fricative (as in "this"). Neither sound exists in Hindi. Hindi speakers for whom English is a second language often substitute the Hindi th (unvoiced aspirated dental plosive) for the first sound, and the Hindi d (voiced unaspirated dental plosive) for the second sound, but note that these sounds are both plosives, not fricatives.
Also please note the corrected term "fricative" rather than "aspirant." Also, the ch chh j jh sounds are affricates, which represented blends of plosives and fricatives, and should be noted as such.
Also, please note that the English t and d are alveolar plosives, which also do not exist in Indian languages. They are close to the retroflex t and d of Indian languages and are often substituted for each other, but they are not the same. It is also not correct to say that the aspirated versions of these sounds do not exist in English. They do exist, but they exist as morphemes of the same phoneme. Think about how a native English speaker pronounces "tank" and "can't." In the first case, you have an aspirated "t" and an unaspirated "k" and in the second case, you have an unaspirated "t" and an aspirated "k," but most English speakers will not recognize the difference between the sounds because the differences are not phonemically significant. In other words, aspiration in English is mostly a function of the position of a sound in a word, not as a function of meaning. 149.79.146.138 20:13, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
199.74.89.238 05:55, 10 January 2006 (UTC)Bavs199.74.89.238 05:55, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
And by "Indian Languages" I presume you mean Indian Indo-European languages. The unvoiced dental fricative th is a staple of all South and South Central Dravidian languages. Kingsleyj 17:06, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
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Remember that Indian languages mean NOT only Hindi
"Indian language" means language spoken in India. It does not necessarily mean Hindi Alone.
The "th" sound is well represented in the language Tamil, which is more than 2000 years old. Doctor Bruno 07:19, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
Tamil is a Classical Language
Tamil has been declared as a Classical Language by the Government of India in 2004 Doctor Bruno 07:24, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
Cleanup
This article needs to use a consistent transliteration scheme, proper grammar, and proper capitalization.
Arun 07:43, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
Small cleanup
I'm no expert but I stumbled across the article and I think it's an important subject, so I've tried to improve the following:
- Literature changed to literature
- "Both of them has a very large collections of Literature of 5000 and 2500 years old repectively (Tamil literature)" changed to "Both of them have very large collections of literature, with the earliest Sanskrit texts dating from 5000 years ago and the earliest Tamil literature from 2500 years ago." No idea if this is right but it's the only sensible thing I could make from the existing sentence. I think some references should be added to give some credence to these dates.
- "it is interestingly being revived" changed to "it is being revived".
- "having more than 74 million speakers, which is 1000 times larger than 6,106 fluent speakers (1981 census) of sanskrit" changed to "having more than 74 million speakers, which is 10,000 times larger than 6,106 fluent speakers of Sanskrit (1981 census)". I'm pretty sure that 1,000 x 6,000 = 6 million. Begs the question whether it's actually 7.4 million speakers of Tamil, but I'm assuming not.
- On a side-note, is this saying that there are 74m speakers in India? Or globally? I don't think an article on the languages of England/UK should spend valuable space noting that English is spoken quite a lot in the USA, so we should make this India only if it isn't already. On the same basis, I've removed the additional comment "Tamil has the official status outside india also" because it's irrelevent.
- Since mellifluous apparently means "pleasing to the ear" I've left it in but I'm slightly concerned at the assumption that Italian is more beautiful to the ear than, say, Celtic and that it is used more in music than, say, English. Again, some references should be added to stop this looking like a POV bias.
Kayman1uk 10:08, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
