[manas96]

I've always observed a curious thing within India regarding the Devnagari (Hindi) and Latin (English) scripts. Essentially all English words are always written in Devnagari, but it's rarely the other way around. For example it is much more likely to see इंग्लिश टू हिंदी than "angrezi se hindi".

My personal theory is that this is because you can make every sound you hear in English using the Devnagari script, but not the other way around.

[vinay427]

> My personal theory is that this is because you can make every sound you hear in English using the Devnagari script, but not the other way around.

This is not very close to true. English (even a given accent) has a rather high number of phonemes, and they don’t overlap very closely with Hindi. What is probably more relevant here is that Devanagari is relatively phonetic so writing in it is useful to describe English pronunciations, more so than the English script is for Hindi (or English, for most unfamiliar words).

A very incomplete list of languages by approximate number of phonemes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...

[3PS]

I think both you and GP are correct, but in different ways.

It's true that the English language has a very large number of phonemes... but accents tend to regularize/restrict these phonemes. For example, a typical bilingual speaker of Indian English and Hindi will replace instances of the /æ/ phoneme (as in "blast" or "fast") with another phoneme like /a:/ (as in "father"). Which isn't that unusual since /æ/ is pretty uncommon among languages.

Other rare English phonemes include the dental fricatives, i.e. the "th" sounds in "ether" (voiceless) and "either" (voiced). Speakers of Indian English often replace this with a dental stop, a "t" sound (voiceless) or "d" sound (voiced). (Note that Devanagari has a _lot_ of stops, so this is one place where it cannot be cleanly encoded into the Latin alphabet without diacritics.)

So overall: while I think Devanagari can't encode e.g. American English, it can actually do a pretty solid job of encoding Indian English, but not the other way around.

[awalGarg]

Sounds like a reasonable theory but do you have an actual example? The one you gave:

> For example, a typical bilingual speaker of Indian English and Hindi will replace instances of the /æ/ phoneme (as in "blast" or "fast") with another phoneme like /a:/ (as in "father"). Which isn't that unusual since /æ/ is pretty uncommon among languages.

does not apply to Indian languages because most of them have daily-use-words with the /æ/ sound.

[ashishb]

> My personal theory is that this is because you can make every sound you hear in English using the Devnagari script, but not the other way around.

Not true. There are phonemes which are similar but distinct.

For example

  -  `v and w` map to the same thing in Hindi
  - th and थ are allophones but different sounds

https://ashishb.net/linguistics/hindi-english-phonemes-that-...

Hindi written in Devanagari is highly phonetic (not perfect but near perfect). However, English is not phonetic at all. E.g., "Th" in Then is different from the "Th" sound in Father.

[devilbunny]

We must be using different forms of English, then, because they sound the same to me. “Thin” and “then” do not.

[umeshunni]

Indeed.

In US pronunciation, Then is ðɛn and Father is ˈfɑðɚ.

In UK (received), Then is ðɛn and Father is ˈfɑːðə(ɹ).

In Indian English, Then is ðɛn and Father is ˈfɑːd̪ə(r)

[ashishb]

Sorry I meant think and not then.

[anon291]

Devanagari has much more phonetic structure than English spelling.

The English Latin letter arrangement holds a tenuous phonetic connection to pronunciation half the time, whereas the devanagari usually indicates exactly how you say it.

[anilgulecha]

Perhaps explains why Indian accent is the way it is - most of the time it's a literal phonetic translation. Words like "champagne" are source of joke for any English learner, but even a simple word like "nature" has a phonetic translation of "Na two rae".

As a Bollywood superstar famously quotes: English is a funny language.

[anon291]

It's that plus the fact that half of spoken Hindi is actually English words cobbled into the language similar to how English was latinized due to the normans and french

[OJFord]

I'm not sure if I don't understand, or completely disagree, but if you look anywhere 'digital' like Reddit for example, a lot of Hindi is written in Latin script. WhatsApp too in private communication, where people don't have or haven't understood how to use a devanagari (or transliterating) keyboard on their phone.

As a Britisher learner it's frustrating¹ actually, because there is a standard for how to do this - IAST, for Sanskrit/derived generally - but of course that's not what native speakers use casually. E.g. your 'angrezi se hindi' would be 'añgrezī se hiñdī' but anyone writing Hindi with those accents is foreign or an academic. (Also people will casually write 'ay' instead of 'e' ए or 'ee' for 'ī' ई, etc. cf. 'paneer'.)

[1: The frustration is because it leads to ambiguity, whereas IAST is 1:1 and so preserves the phonetic nature of devanāgarī, and tells me exactly which t/d/r sound, if it's aspirated, etc. which a fluent native layperson's anglicised interpretation really doesn't. They might write gora & gora and know from context if that's gora or ghoṛā, but if I don't already know the word a gora like me is stuck.]

[ashishb]

Many foreign learners have written about it. Essentially, one can follow conventions around oneself or try to write and get an English spelling that sounds closest to Hindi pronunciation. And there are no academic rules around it that one is taught in schools in India.

I learnt about IAST only after seeing how foreigners transcribe Sanskrit texts in Latin.

See this amazing article by a Polish journalist https://thediplomat.com/2021/01/spell-it-out-should-english-...

[kranner]

> your 'angrezi se hindi' would be 'añgrezī se hiñdī'

That should be 'aṅgrezī se hiṅdī' per IAST. In Devanagari: अंग्रेज़ी से हिंदी

If it were ñ instead of ṅ, the Devanagari would be अँग्रेज़ी से हिँदी which is incorrect.

[OJFord]

Thanks, I'm slack on that because I can't type it!

(I also am often unsure which is correct, since as you no doubt know it's so common to drop the चंद्र and write हूं for example where it's properly हूँ )

[tanduv]

In a lot of "technical" situations, people tend to opt for the well established English counter parts for nouns or concepts. eg even a native Hindi speaker will use कंप्यूटर / computer over संगणक / Sanganak