h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Apart from Londoners who dorp every 'h' I ususllay hear Hindi pronounced with the 'h' - I hope that's not too much of a disappointment. Unless of course it was Londonders wot farnd India and sich.

No. We pronounce it with an H.

To add to the confusion....it used to be called 'Hindustan'. Yet it's the River Indus (and the Indus valley, now in Pakistan)

Which makes me wonder whether it was the English that started to drop the H (which is done in many regional dialect and was, I think, the norm in 18thC upper-class English), or whether variations are found in the various Indian languages.

Incidentally, Turkish for 'turkey' (the poultry) is 'hindi', whilst in French it's 'la dinde' (from 'd'inde' = 'from India). A few other languages make this Indian link, too. Strange, given that they come from America.

But then we called native Americans Indians...

Rudyard Kipling reported that the native name for India was Hind.

I think it is more likely that the h got dropped by the southern Europeans long before the time of the Raj. They were the ones who established the trade from Europe to India, particularly the Venetians. The Venetians spoke a dialect of Italian, and in Italian, h's are not pronounced.

I'm not convinced. There were also Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese. The first two pronounce Hs

But never mind that. John Peel has died!!!

What about the legacy of Muslim rule in India (11th-14th century)? Didn’t they have any influence on the name?

katkodl

The Moguls arrived from Persia, where they had made Parsi their court language. Parsi, like most Northern Indian languages is Indo-European, but they also brought some borrowings from Arabic - which has aspirates. Parsi was also their government language in India, and since the East India Company sub-contracted a lot of their administration to them (they only 'Anglified' after the 1857 mutiny) - I guess the British would have largely spoken to them in Parsi. Hindi and Urdu are (variants of) a lingua franca derived from Sanskrit, but with borrowings from Parsi, Arabic, English and various Dravidian languages.

I guess I'll have to go away and check whether Sanskrit or Proto-Indo-European have an H sound

Interesting! Sanskrit and (probably) proto-Indo-European had unvoiced aspirates. Think of it as a sort of 'breathy' H sound.

So, possibly 'Hind' came over as either 'Hind' or 'Ind', depending on the speaker, the listener and their respective dialects and languages

To Edward in Post 9405.

In Spanish they don't pronounce the "H". (cf "habanera", the verbs "hacer" and "haber") They have a sound similar to our "h" for the letters "j" and "g" when followed by a vowel (e.g. Jose, Jerez, Jamón) However, judging by your postings so far, I think you know that, you just got a bit muddled up.

Trillian's Child says "~jwf~, Edward and Burgess certainly know their onions."

I once wrote to the Irish Times mentioning "those who know their Onions", and they kindly published my letter but they also incorrectly belittled Dr. Onions's capital O.

http://www.nla.gov.au/collect/onions.html

And if you think I misuse the word belittle above, my reference is to Homer Simpson, defending its contrary term: "Embiggens is a perfectly cromulent word".

Remembering Spine Milligna:

"What's a Hindhu?"









"Lays eggs!"

Recumbentman,
Thanks for the Onions revelation. I used to wonder about that when I was young but couldn't find an answer. If I live long enough, perhaps I'll know everything.

There are a few more differences... I knew a woman who was a class mate when I was doing Linguistics last year, who grew up in India, but her English was better than her Hindi because her parents sent her to an English speaking (immersion) boarding school so that her English would be perfect! (It is.) She learned Urdu so she could write poetry, because it's "better than Hindi for that purpose" she told me. An extremely clever and beautiful young woman, whose husband died last April of leukemia, the sole support of his and her parents in New Zealand. I almost wanted to learn Urdu so as to read her poetry!

My Chinese students told me that the Chinese word for India is something like "Inn Dee" (they wrote it down for me but not in English! So I can give it here only as I heard it...

>> ...Muslim rule in India (11th-14th century)? Didn’t they have any influence on the name? <<

You may be confusing Al India with Air India.

The magic carpet does seem to be a cross cultural clue.

Anybody remember the Air India bombing off Ireland?
Oh it was about ten years ago now. The flight originated in Vancouver. For ten years the RCMP have been trying to pin it on Sikh 'extremists'.

>> SIKH
[Hindi, from Sanskrit iya, disciple, from ikati, he wishes to learn, desiderative of aknoti, is able.]
<<

But that doesn't sound like the definition of an extremist. So maybe it was the Muslims.


kerry on,
~jwf~

~jwf~, maybe you have a too idealistic view of Indians/Hindus! They are people like all of us are, and I have heard of many extremist acts committed by Hindus in India, against Muslim and Christians! (In the last few years, that is.)

I live in hope that one day some really smart person will create a religion that by its design cannot be used as an excuse for murder or perversion.

There is evil hiding behind the skirts of every god. All the existing religions have been equally corrupted.

The extremes of lust and rage and greed are akin to the extremes of fear. And fear is the basis of all religions. The religious impulse is a panic response in the face of the unknown. As William Bendix character in "Wake Island" said just before they were all massacred by the Japanese, "There ain't no atheists in a foxhole."

The epiphany of fear is similar to the epiphanies of rage and lust and greed. It doesn't take much of a political mind to co-opt a system based on fear to support an agenda of pain and blood. All the existing religions have been corrupted, time and time again.

jwf

>>"There ain't no atheists in a foxhole"

I'd always thought that that was attributed to Patton. And I'm trying to remember who was the famous person who was involved in the Italian campaign who later said "I can assure you there was at least one."

Why were they called foxholes? A fox that lived that openly wouldn't last very long,even after the "unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable" have been banned

A whie ago, there was a conversation about words missing in some languages that do exist in others. What has always struck me as odd, is that as far as I know there is no English word to say when you offer something to someone else.
If you give a friend for instance a cup of coffee, you might say 'Here you go', but it's not him you want to go (away), but you are in a way saying goodbye to the cup of coffee, right?
S'il vous plait (as you please), Bitte Schoen (don't know how to do an umlaut) and Alstublieft (dutch, if it pleases you) exist. What do English people say in such cases?

I think you may be onto something here - "There you have it," "There you are," "Here you are," "Here you go," all mean pretty much the same thing. Does "S'il vous plait" serve for this as well as just please? It's still a phrase rather than a word. Some of these types of phrase come from a more genteel time, I think, so perhaps we have a word that has fallen into disuse due to a more equal social set up. What would a servant have said to an employer?

Well, you answered it yourself, really: "Here you go" or "Here you are". "You're welcome"