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Mark Smullen

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Dec 12, 2002, 8:30:15 PM12/12/02
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How do I say "Little Cat" in Hindi?

Alok Kumar

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Dec 13, 2002, 1:55:03 AM12/13/02
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Mark Smullen <markcs...@rogers.com> wrote in message news:<markcsmullen-5F14...@nntp.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com>...

> How do I say "Little Cat" in Hindi?

Little = Chhotee
Cat == Billee

Little cat == Chhotee billee if the cat is female
Chaotaa billaa if the cat is male

If you you don't know the gender it would be Chotee billee.
There's no neutral gender in Hindi.

Mark Smullen

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Dec 13, 2002, 8:04:09 AM12/13/02
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Thanks so much. I have a pronounciation question.

Chhotee - cha-ho-tee, or cho-tee, or 'ch' as in 'charidna' (buy,
purchase)?

Billee - as in 'billy', bill-ee (longer e sound)?

Regards

M. Smullen

In article <cba03d0.02121...@posting.google.com>,

Sunil Bhadekar

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Dec 13, 2002, 8:01:32 PM12/13/02
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Mark,


क्या आप हिन्दी सीख रहे हैं?

Assuming you are a student of Hindi and under Devanagari, here are the words
in Devanagari (using Unicode/UTF-8):

chhoTee bill-lee: छोटी बिल्ली

If you can't read the Unicode, here's another way:

'chh' is like the 'ch' sound in chair but with more aspiration, somewhat
like chhair.

'o' as in the American pron. of letter 'o'
'T' like the 't' in hat (no aspiration for t)
'ee' as in 'meek' (long ee)

Your word 'charidna' (verb. purchase, buy) is usually transliterated as
'kharidnaa' (ख़रीदना). When 'ch' is used, it usually stands for 'च' as is
चमक (ch-m-k meaning the noun 'shine').

Hope this helps,
Sunil

Mark Smullen

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Dec 14, 2002, 6:00:24 PM12/14/02
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Big help, thank you Sunil. I am beginner at Hindi, and have completed
Pimsleur Hindi 1, a 10 unit course which lays out the basics of
conversation. It is an audio course, so I am trying to learn to read the
Hindi script myself.

I have a font, but since I'm a Mac user, the font may not match up with
your unicode.

Regards

Mark


In article <BAY1-DAV28e0J...@hotmail.com>,
"Sunil Bhadekar" <Use-Author-Address-Header@[127.1]> wrote:

> Mark,
>
>
> ???? ?? ?????? ??? ??? ????


>
> Assuming you are a student of Hindi and under Devanagari, here are the words
> in Devanagari (using Unicode/UTF-8):
>

> chhoTee bill-lee: ???? ??????


>
> If you can't read the Unicode, here's another way:
>
> 'chh' is like the 'ch' sound in chair but with more aspiration, somewhat
> like chhair.
>
> 'o' as in the American pron. of letter 'o'
> 'T' like the 't' in hat (no aspiration for t)
> 'ee' as in 'meek' (long ee)
>
> Your word 'charidna' (verb. purchase, buy) is usually transliterated as

> 'kharidnaa' (???????). When 'ch' is used, it usually stands for '?' as is
> ??? (ch-m-k meaning the noun 'shine').
>
> Hope this helps,
> Sunil

Pritesh Patel

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Dec 15, 2002, 12:40:55 PM12/15/02
to
Mark,
I would really recommend you buying this book to learn Hindi. Listening
to audio tapes is great to learn how to pronounce things and see how
sentences are expressed, but to actually learn the language you really
should be doing it from a book (if you can't take a class). Check out
"Teach Yourself Hindi" which is part of the Teach Yourself series. It's
very good for non-natives. The author himself is not Indian, but is an
expert in the language, which is why the book's ability to teach other
non-natives is good. It's ISBN is 0-658-00904-4 and sells for $18 (usd).
There is a version that comes with a couple of audio tapes and sells for a
little more, but I don't think you need it since you have your own audio
tapes. Cheers.
Pritesh


Mark Smullen

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Dec 15, 2002, 9:33:54 PM12/15/02
to
Thank Pritesh. I was wondering what my next step should be. I'm finished
Pimsleur's Hindi 1, and I really want to keep going. I found a lot of
books on Amazon.com, but I don't really know which ones are good and
which aren't. My local big book shop doesn't have any Hindi language
books, can you believe it?! It's not like I'm living in the middle of
nowhere. There's a HUGE Indian population in my area.

I'll follow up on your tip about that book. Thanks again.

Mark


In article <293L9.110$zu2....@typhoon.nyu.edu>,

Pritesh Patel

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Dec 16, 2002, 9:19:49 PM12/16/02
to
Ohh, one more thing. I am also a student of Hindi (which is why I knew
about that book), and my Hindi professor actually is building an online
"virtual" hindi classroom. I am helping her create it (I do much/all of the
new web devel and multimedia work). You may want to check it out. There's
a bunch of stories you can listen to (and read if you know the script).
There's also some grammar lessons available which you can look over while
you decide on a book to get. I will also be finalizing some video clips and
they should be on the web in mid January so you can see natural speakers
speaking. You will need to download the hindi font (Xdvng) from the main
page (link below) to see the hindi script. if you have netscape 4, you can
use the site's dynamic font. if you have ie, the dynamic font will also
work, but there is a problem with the spacing and some characters not being
seen in the hindi script... so you may need to adjust your font size which
usually fixes the problem.

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/mideast/hindi/

if you take a look at it, I would really appreciate it if you could give me
some feedback on it (email me, not the group), since you are a non-native
speaker. any feedback you (or anybody actually) could give me would be
passed along to my Hindi professor and she could then add/remove/modify
things that work, dont work, etc. Thanks.
Pritesh


Sunil Bhadekar

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Dec 16, 2002, 10:26:05 PM12/16/02
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> My local big book shop doesn't have any Hindi language
> books, can you believe it?! It's not like I'm living in the middle of
> nowhere. There's a HUGE Indian population in my area.
>
Mark,

That's no surprise.

There are two reasons for this:

1. The lingual diversity of India means the market is very fragmented.
The number of "potential" consumers of Hindi books is therefore much
less than the HUGE Indian population in the area.

2. Very few Hindi speakers outside the Hindi area of India normally
read/write in Hindi. Hindi is only used mainly for verbal
communication or songs/poetry, wherever emotions are involved. For
everything else, English rules.

Because there are no (or very few) readers, there are obviously no
(very few) writers of Hindi works besides those for TV or movies,
which again deal with emotions and use limited words relating to
"love" and "heart".

And such is the case with most other Indian languages too; which are
also dying languages where reading material is concerned.

Other languages like Japanese, Thai, French, German or what-have-you
are used daily in their native places, are used as mediums of
instruction in schools, business communication, etc. And so there are
obviously lots of books published in these languages, and you see them
in bookstores everywhere.

Anyway, I for one, am not for artificial propping up, and if the
future of India (and perhaps the world) is English, so be it. Although
we'll have to do something about the non-phonetic spellings of that
particular language :-)

Cheers,
Sunil

Sunil Bhadekar

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Dec 17, 2002, 11:40:41 AM12/17/02
to
Pritesh,

Why don't you present the Hindi content on your website using an
encoding standard like Unicode (UTF-8) instead of using a proprietary
format? This is the fast emerging standard for Indian language
content. Take a look at some sample sites like the BBC Hindi website
(http://www.bbchindi.com) or the Google Hindi edition
(http://www.google.com/intl/hi/). There are many benefits to using
this standard; for instance:

1. Native OS support for both viewing and editing: Hindi pages can be
viewed without any downloads on Windows/Linux. Windows 2K/XP natively
support Hindi Unicode editing. There are applications like Yudit on
Linux which support Hindi Unicode editing.
2. Search facilities using common search engines: When users enter
Hindi Unicode queries at Google for example, links to your pages will
show up if they contain those words.
3. Font independence

- Sunil

Pritesh Patel

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Dec 17, 2002, 10:25:15 PM12/17/02
to
Hey Sunil,
I had thought of converting the site to Unicode, but the site was
originally developed before I came to this school using the Xdvng font (the
amount of devanagari characters xdvng supports is much more than what
unicode provides). So, when I started working for the department, adding
new things to the Hindi site was done in Xdvng font just to continue using
the same format. So now converting everything to Unicode would take a long
time, and unfortunately I'm graduating in a semester so there'll be nobody
around to do it. I was using Takhti (sp?) for a while to see how easy it
would be to type everything in Unicode. I picked it up pretty quickly, but
when I tried to view it on my friends Win98 machine, he wasn't able to see
the characters.. so I'm guessing that there are some machines that you would
still need to download a font that supports the hindi character set? I know
my XP machine has Mangal, not sure what the other OS's have. I'll check out
Unicode again for the site, but I think my prof. really likes the Xdvng font
simply because of all the conjunct characters it has (last time I looked at
the Unicode standard, it didn't have a lot of the conjuncts, like ? + ? ).
or did I overlook this? Thanks.
Pritesh


Pritesh Patel

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Dec 18, 2002, 11:34:58 AM12/18/02
to
You know what, I just spent an hour playing around with the unicode charset
(using the character map in xp), and i figured out how to make the
conjuncts. i cant believe it was that simple. i have a question for you
Sunil. i was searching google and i found a site where you and a number of
other people on this group were talking about the hindi unicode
(www.aksharamala.com) and you mentioned you were using a different character
map for takhti. would you be willing to post that character map? i'd like
to see what changes you made from the default map. thanks.
pritesh


Sunil Bhadekar

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Dec 18, 2002, 2:17:00 PM12/18/02
to
(last time I looked at
> the Unicode standard, it didn't have a lot of the conjuncts
> or did I overlook this? Thanks.

Pritesh,

That's because Unicode does not define or need to define any conjuncts. It
is simply an encoding of content, not of the display. Here are some
examples:

1. kta is encoded as ka+halant+ta (क्त = क+्+त)
2. ksha is encoded as ka+halant+sha (क्ष = क+्+ष)

The display of the encoded content is handled by the TTF OpenType font like
Mangal for example.

Also, how you type in these conjuncts depends on the keyboard layout you are
using.

This is just FYI, not to persuade you to change to Unicode. Although I think
the fact that the site won't be searchable using Google will be a major
disadvantage in terms of loss of potential viewership.

Cheers,
Sunil

Alok Kumar

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Dec 19, 2002, 4:22:59 AM12/19/02
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"Pritesh Patel" <pkp...@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<tURL9.132$zu2....@typhoon.nyu.edu>...

> Hey Sunil,
> I had thought of converting the site to Unicode, but the site was
> originally developed before I came to this school using the Xdvng font (the
> amount of devanagari characters xdvng supports is much more than what
> unicode provides). So, when I started working for the department, adding
The last I heard, (on http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net) the
Xdvng font was being converted to unicode.
When I say this, I mean that the glyphs(font faces) will be the same,
only the encoding changes.
So while that's going on, why not convert the site to utf-8 by the
side? That's going to font independent and visually the same once the
xdvng utf-8 font comes out.
You could ask volunteers to do the conversion for your site, or better
still suggest your instructor to make it a class project - it would
give you a lot of Hindi writing practice now that all the tools are
available on both linux and windows.

Sunil Bhadekar

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Dec 19, 2002, 10:22:41 PM12/19/02
to
Essentially I modified the Takhti keymap so that I could type using
the INSCRIPT layout when using Takhti. Since you are using XP, you
shouldn't even need Takhti for the INSCRIPT layout. Notepad and the MS
IME will do just fine.

Anyway, I'll look for the keymap and post it in the next few days..

- Sunil

"Pritesh Patel" <pkp...@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<Us1M9.139$zu2....@typhoon.nyu.edu>...

Sunil Bhadekar

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Dec 20, 2002, 6:35:12 PM12/20/02
to
Pritesh,

Here's the INSCRIPT keymap for use with takhti. Back up the hindi.map
file supplied by takhti (in the takhti.exe directory) and replace it
with the map below. The filename should be hindi.map.

Cheers,
Sunil

---------------------------------8<-------------------------
`
~
1 0967
! 090D
2 0968
@ 0945
3 0969
#
4 096a
$
5 096b
%
6 096c
^
7 096d
&
8 096e
*
9 096f
(
0 0966
)
-
_ 0903
= 090B
+ 0943
q 094C
Q 0914
w 0948
W 090E
e 093E
E 0906
r 0940
R 0908
t 0942
T 090A
y 092C
Y 092D
u 0939
U 0919
i 0917
I 0918
o 0926
O 0927
p 091C
P 091D
[ 0921
{ 0922
] 093C
} 091E
\ 0949
| 0911
a 094B
A 0913
s 0947
S 090F
d 094D
D 0905
f 093F
F 0907
g 0941
G 0909
h 092A
H 092b
j 0930
J 0931
k 0915
K 0916
l 0924
L 0925
; 091A
: 091B
' 091F
" 0920
z 093D
Z 200D
x 0902
X 0901
c 092E
C 0923
v 0928
V
b 0935
B
n 0932
N 0933
m 0938
M 0936
,
< 0937
.
> 0964
/ 092F
?

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