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Indian English is Weird & Britishers are to Blame - Schwa Deletion & Sound Pronunciations - FutureIQ

257,831 views • Jun 14, 2024
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Concepts in this episode

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  1. Apparent Stupidity Hides a Hidden Constraint mental-model

    A choice that looks foolish from outside may be rational under a constraint you cannot yet see. Treat your confusion as a prompt to reconstruct the pressure, history, trade-off, or rule behind the choice before judging it.

  2. Schwa Deletion mechanism

    Schwa deletion is the hidden rule that lets the same written syllable produce different spoken forms: North Indian usage often drops an inherent final “a,” while Sanskrit retains it. The difficulty is knowing which convention governs the word in front of you.

  3. Halant (Virama) mechanism

    The halant makes a suppressed inherent vowel visible exactly where it disappears. It turns a pronunciation exception from something you must remember into something the script itself can disclose.

  4. Lossy Encoding Across Mismatched Alphabets principle

    When a rich sound system is written with an alphabet that marks fewer distinctions, transcription becomes lossy encoding: distinct sounds must share symbols, or spelling must improvise new signals. The resulting oddity belongs to the mapping between systems, not necessarily to the speaker.

  5. Loanword Phonemes principle

    Borrowed words can carry foreign phonemes into a language. If the host script has no native symbol for the imported sound, spelling must approximate or improvise rather than map speech cleanly.

  6. Digraphs as Improvised Disambiguators mechanism

    When an alphabet lacks a dedicated letter for a borrowed sound, spelling can become a warning system: digraphs or otherwise spare letters signal that the usual pronunciation rules no longer apply.

Description

Why Indian English is different? You might have noticed that many India-specific English words have inconsistent spellings for their sounds. Why does that happen? Why do we spell Ram as Rama and Mahabharat as Mahabharata? There is an interesting story behind this. The story of Schwa or the deletion of it. Let's understand how English changed the way we perceive certain words and what is the right way in this episode. Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter: @ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra @shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS Watch other episodes of The FutureIQ podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAppTB0r5_TaYueZ0adD42Wiw5X-wTE4v More videos for you: The elegance of Devanagari: https://youtu.be/xASDr0nuIf4 Bhagavad Gita lesson: https://youtu.be/95Zi_4OthbY The problem with India’s English: https://youtu.be/P4TcPyEt1fg Cool facts about India’s food: https://youtu.be/J1ECp8OmsxA The real reason behind India’s population: https://youtu.be/Sjur6Bu30YM The real middle class of India: https://youtu.be/z4Qf44Ti338 Links if you want more: Ram vs Rama thread: https://twitter.com/NGKabra/status/1310829486347223040 Schwa deletion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa_deletion_in_Indo-Aryan_languages Why South writes Th: https://www.quora.com/Why-South-Indians-write-t-as-th Other sounds: https://avtans.com/2022/05/10/a-note-on-%E0%A4%A1%E0%A4%BC-r%CC%A4-in-indian-languages/ Why isn't தமிழ் spelt "Thamizh": https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/36464/why-isnt-%E0%AE%A4%E0%AE%AE%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%B4%E0%AF%8D-spelt-thamizh-or-at-least-thamil Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 00:30 Were British idiots? 01:20 Sanskrit pronunciations 06:08 Other inconsistencies 07:47 Ghazal 08:54 Qutub Minar - K vs Q 09:53 Extra h in South Indian languages 12:02 Tamil or Tamizh? 14:37 Gyan vs Dnyan 16:17 V vs W #futureiq #linguistics #indianenglish

Transcript

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