Re: shirt in Hindi


On 7-May-2005, "Neeraj Mathur" <neemathur@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote in message <d5js2b$a1g$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

> "Jim Heckman" <wnzrfeurpxzna@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:117ql1qohev02e4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> > What I don't get about all this is that
> > the Devana:gari: spelling is unambiguously <qami:z>, according to my
> > copy of _Teach Yourself Hindi_.
>
> Lol - spelling in Hindi is almost never unambiguous, despite what Indians
> may tell you. Particularly with the 'dotted' letters (except for the
> cerebral 'r' sounds),

As a native speaker, could you describe the articulatory difference
between the dental/alveolar 'r' and the retroflex one? I've read
differing accounts.

> expect to find great variation in spelling and
> pronunciation; sometimes people don't bother to write the dots even if
> they
> say them as if they were there, sometimes not writing the dots is because
> they're not said that way by most speakers.

OK, nice to know.

> Much as I detest them myself, I would nevertheless recommend that, when
> you've gotten sufficiently far in your course (is that the Snell and
> Weightman you're using, or Mohini Rao?),

Snell and Weightman.

> you watch a few Hindi movies. At least one or two, if you can manage
> them. Despite being overwhelmingly awful for the most part - with, to
> be fair, some rare exceptions - they provide a very 'normal'-type
> register of the language, both in terms of vocabulary and phonology.
> At any rate, imitating what you hear in movies is going to ensure
> that your speech is not too obviously 'marked' in any way to hearers
> and is acceptably featureless to everybody. (This is relevant when,
> for instance, bargaining prices and stuff; while it's difficult to
> avoid looking foreign, you don't want to sound too obviously 'Hindu'
> or 'Muslim' if you can avoid it!)

Thanks, but I'm unlikely to make the effort to progress that far unless
I someday have occasion to spend significant time in India, which I
don't currently foresee.

> > The <q> seems to strongly suggest a
> > Perso-Arabic origin, but as you say Arabic /S/ is pronounced /s/ not
> > /z/ in Persian, which would seem to support the Portuguese-origin
> > theory. Could the spelling really be a mixture of the two?
>
> I think so - see my reply to Yusuf.
>
> Once again, I will restate that, as a native speaker, I have never heard
> anything but [kami:z] for this word. To be honest, it's not terribly
> popular
> anyway these days; most people are more likely to say /SarT/.

I assume you're using /S/ a la ASCII-IPA and /T/ for the retroflex 't',
per the usual Hindi reflex of English /t/. Is /SarT/ masculine or
feminine?

--
Jim Heckman
.

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