Changing pronounciation of Indic languages

English has had a major impact on all Indic languages since the times of the Raj. It is quite evident to knowers of Indic languages that roman script is no match to the richness of Indic languages. To overcome this limitation, transliteration schemes have been proposed. Of various schemes, National Library at Calcutta romanization transliteration scheme is the most popular for Indic languages.

This scheme is good if it is known to everybody. But over the years, all the modifiers to basic roman scripts like ā, ṭa etc have disappeared from transliterated words leading to corrupted pronounciation by not only someone who is not a native speaker of an Indic language but also by native speakers. For example, in Hindi, it is `Ram' but it is mostly written as `Rama' due to the transliteration scheme. Any casual speaker would incorrectly pronounce the word.

On the other hand, this has lead to a pronounciation that is somewhere between original Sanskrit (which had an inherent visarga, अः, at the end of words).

As I mentioned in one of my previous blogs, it's amazing how languages grow!!

T-shirt

Did some designing. Had some design in mind and found this site [cafepress.com] which publishes your designs for sale. So, here I am, with my first on-line shop selling T-shirts. Have only one design though.

Don't know whether I would be doing more brain-scratching for further designs, but if you like this, do purchase.

napoli ke thug

A bad end to my tour di italy. Were robbed by thugs of napoli claiming to be police. My colleague lost his money and was too upset. I know it can happen anywhere but is very frightening when you are a foriegner.

And have been listening to the stories of mugging/robbing ever since then. Have started to believe that there is no safe place in this world.

Just a piece of advice, don't give too much importance to materialistic things like money and world becomes a better place for you.

Blogs - 2

Addition to my previous blog about blogs.

Wal-Mart is now roping in bloggers for a PR campaign.