Linguistics

There are at least three different ways “ch” gets pronounced in English words and that tells you the origin of those words.

English has a very commonly used vowel that doesn’t exist in Indic languages natively. It is ɛ- Open-mid front unrounded vowel. Consider the word bet, its vowel sound is halfway between bat/बैत़ and bait/बेत़. This vowel is fairly common in English, for example, tech whose vowel sound is halfway between tack and take. Or met which is half-way between mat and mate. Now, this sound is not natively written in Hindi....

Tharman, the 9th president of Singapore is of Indian Tamil ethnicity. The pronunciation of his first name shows how various languages use Latin alphabets.

I had just landed in the Czech Republic. I was taking a bus from Prague airport to the city. The man sitting next to me was dressed in formal. He was here to attend a meeting of the ESA, European Space Agency. I asked, “What language is the meeting in?”. “English”, he replied, nonchalantly.

Hindi and English have several similar yet distinct phonemes.

The phonetics of German are relatively easy for more Hindi speakers except for a few sounds that are more nuanced.

Latin script is the most recognized script in the world today. Most Western European languages, including some widely spoken ones like English, Spanish, and French use the same script with minor differences. The pronunciation variation, however, is a different matter altogether. Nothing illustrates it better than the popular Spanish last name Chavez. The name has three syllables. And is pronounced in 5 different ways!

A few years back, I wasted time on Duolingo trying to learn Spanish. I no longer do that and you shouldn’t. Here’s why it’s not effective and better alternatives.

Every resource that I came across tries to teach Spanish to English speakers. Those who already know Hindi/Devanagari have certain advantages. Both in terms of producing the correct Spanish pronunciation as well as being able to read/speak the Spanish language. Like Hindi, Spanish is much more phonetic and rule-based than English.

About 50% of Indians use Hindi as their primary language. Hindi/Devanagari is fairly phonetic except when it starts to import foreign words. And that’s why many Indians, with Hindi as their primary language, end up with incorrect pronunciations of foreign, mainly English, words. Let’s look at a few specific categories of mistakes.