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Comment by amitsy | Hacker News Reader

I agree to the first point you mentioned. In certain utility apps like payments etc this would hold true. In an internet without words i.e. images and video that would be true as well. But currently a large part of internet we use is text. Case in point, this article itself and this discussion. With the current technologies we have, for most part of Hindi speaking users, it is easy to speak in Hindi but very difficult to type in it.

As per using hindi words in english alpbhabets, my argument is - majority of India can't even read or speak english, how will they type in English? A lot of your friends do that because Hindi input is very hard and we need better tools.

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> majority of India can't even read or speak english, how will they type in English?

They won't. They type in Hindi, using the roman alphabet. Big difference. If anything, the roman alphabet is simpler than the syllable based Devanagari.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari

Apparently SMS is big in India:

> SMS is hugely popular in India, where youngsters often exchange lots of text messages, and companies provide alerts, infotainment, news, cricket scores updates, railway/airline booking, mobile billing, and banking services on SMS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_messaging

I assume it has largely been done with cheap dumbphones even after 2007, which would mean no access to Devanagari characters, so there has been a long time, and a huge incentive to learn transliteration.

So, are you saying in the long run Devanagari as a script will die but Hindi as a language shall remain. Pretty interesting point. Seems like this is the direction we are going as well.

I suppose it is possible.

For that to happen, there might be a need to teach and encourage it. I don't know how nationalistic India is, and if it would be well recieved. There is apparently an ISO standard for Indic scripts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15919

My own experience is limited to my sri lankan wife who enjoys texting with her friends. Among them, spelling is rather haphazard.

> If anything, the roman alphabet is simpler than the syllable based Devanagari.

Sure, until you need to figure out which of the four phonemes a letter corresponds to which is very difficult for foreign language learners of Hindi, as it can be for English. I am a native English speaker but I picked up Devanagari in a day or so because it's actually relatively consistent due to the phonetic syllabic nature.

But that problem is entirely due to English, not the roman alphabet. Same in French. No such problem in German or Italian.

Swedish has a few redundant "ch" sounds; k, sj, sch, skj and tj.

You would need quite a few diacritics to map to all of the Hindi phonemes, especially including loanword phonemes (/z/, etc.) I'm not saying this is bad, but it's not the easy solution that it was made out to be. Meanwhile, Devanagari handles consonant and vowel phonemes quite consistently as others have pointed out.

> They type in Hindi

Not sure the majority of Indians speak Hindi either.

They do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...

Your link claims 41% for Hindi. The majority seems to speek something else as the mother tongue.

> If anything, the roman alphabet is simpler than the syllable based Devanagari.

Actually, you're just arguing that the input methods for Latin are simpler (and I agree). Devanagari is superior in almost every respect to Latin alphabet, from phonetics (in पाणिनी) to arrangement - it can be entered as easily with IMEs - the lack of which is an indication of the state of things.

To put this in perspective, if Indians were using logographic characters like China/Japan, the current input methods would be akin to old Chinese typewriters.

Is the roman alphabet actually simpler? In some sense it is, but that's partly because it obscures a lot of detail that Devanagari captures.

For example, consider the name "Poisson". One one occasion I repeatedly tried to communicate it it's pronunciation in English, but failed. Then I wrote "प्वसैं" and my friend totally understood it.

In spite of speaking virtually no Hindi, I find it far easier to express various phonetic words in Devanagari than in Roman letters. And as far as learning pronunciation, it's virtually impossible learning Hindi correctly from Roman letter transliteration.

In my view as a native English speaker, Devanagari is a much better alphabet than the Roman one.

I'm not sure you're really comparing qualities of alphabets here.

Whether there is a good phonetic correspondence between phonemes and written syllables is independent of the alphabet.

If you read German or Italian, the correspondence is close to perfect. In English or in French, it's awful.

It's possible that there is a better phonetic correspondence between Hindi phonemes represented by Devanagari characters and French phonemes (in the case of "Poisson") than with English phonemes represented with roman characters (e.g. no satisfactory transcription for the French "on"), but that's unrelated to the alphabets.

If you were talking to people who could read French, you'd show them "Poisson", and they'd pronounce it perfectly. It just so happens that English speakers pronounce "on" a different way.

This is a good comment, but slightly complicated and took my a while to figure out what you were saying. I think your point is that he said "alphabet" but meant "language".

Basically, you can't really figure out English pronunciation from the way a word is written at all, because English isn't phonetic (e.g. Polish and polish, and many, many more).

For phonetic languages, the correlation between spelling and pronunciation is close to perfect (i.e. words are pronounced the way they are spelt [or spelled - wtf English]) - but only for the sounds in that language. Hence it may be possible to transliterate most English word to Devanagari. Most famously, e.g. English into Japanese doesn't work, even though Japanese itself is also phonetic but is e.g. missing the 'r' sound. The reverse is also true, unless you use extra punctuation to signify syllable boundaries or stress. E.g. Asakusa is 浅草 Asa-kusa and thus the stress changes and it's pronounced AsaKSA, not ASAkusa. I guess you could also transliterate it close enough with asaxa and people would probably get the stress right, further proof than English isn't the best tool for this.

(I think all the explanation of the previous paragraph is encompassed by "phonemes", which I had to google and still don't quite understand.)

The only "language" that can handle transliteration of any language is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which isn't a language because it doesn't have grammar or vocabulary or really anything except well-defined glyphs/symbols and the corresponding pronunciation.

From what little I've seen of French, the French person just knows how Poisson should be pronounced and does it.

This is even how most of english works. And there is actually a much better phonetic correspondence between Devanagari and English phonemes than between roman letters/letter pairs and English phonemes.

Consider "The" (as in the 3 letter word) vs "Theranos". The roman string "the" represents a different sound in both words. In Devanagari the two sounds are represented by "द" and "ये" (the letter is य means "tha" and the े changes the "a" to "e" as in "egg"), respectively, so you'd transliterate to द and येरनौस respectively. (A native speaker please correct me if I'm getting this wrong.)

It's possible that in German and Italian, the correspondence between letters and sounds is a lot better than in English. But from what I can tell, devanagari would make a more phonetic English alphabet than Roman letters do.

English is notoriously awful when it comes to phoneme/grapheme correspondence (French is pretty close).

Essentially what you're saying is that Devanagari is superior because there's something closer to a phoneme/grapheme bijection. Which may or may not be true, even though it wouldn't surprise me (I don't know it at all, but I assume some English sounds aren't as trivial to transliterate).

But that's entirely orthogonal to the alphabet. In fact, you could perfectly map Devanagari (or IPA) to unambiguous roman syllables, so that the "Th" sound in "The" is written differently than the "Th" sound in "Theranos." It's just a matter of coding.

Which may or may not be true, even though it wouldn't surprise me (I don't know it at all, but I assume some English sounds aren't as trivial to transliterate).

From what I can tell Hindi phonemes are a superset of English phonemes. I can't think of any that don't transliterate well, certainly not any common ones. I've been told by several native Hindi or Marathi speakers that they rarely run into a western phoneme that they can't already pronounce.

I agree that we could make a better roman-like alphabet. My only point is that Devanagari already seems to do a good job of this, and this may be why it seems a bit more complicated than Roman letters - it expresses things that Roman letters don't.

> From what I can tell Hindi phonemes are a superset of English phonemes.

This isn't exactly correct. There are a variety of allophones that many Hindi-native speakers use in their English that aren't used by most native English speakers outside of India such as the retroflex t, trilled or flap r, and others. There are also others missing from Hindi entirely such as /ʒ/.

See phoneme tables for English and Hindi/Urdu (in IPA for instance) for more details.

I agree with your premise, in any case, that Devanagari describes far more than the English/Roman script.

With the growing use of Whatsapp in India, SMS is actually quickly dying as a medium of communication between humans here. Poeple who have whatsapp (there's a lot of them in india) seem to use that to communicate instead of SMS (which is then used mostly for messages from companies, or stuff like 2-factor authentication etc).

Also, I see a lot of people use Whatapp to send/share actual hindi (written in devnagari) instead of hindi written in roman alphabet. I would say the latter is still more popular, but the former growing quite a lot.

Another thing I see is people use whatsapp to bypass typing altogether. Since you can share pretty much any media easily on whatsapp and other messaging serivices, I've seen some people leave short voice messages instead of typing text.

During Nasscom Product Conclave this year someone mentioned that more than 60% of WhatsApp messages are in local language (Phonetic or Native typing mode).

I have probably several thousand Whatsapp messages in Hindi typed phonetically in the Roman alphabet on my phone. Well, more honestly it's Hinglish, but still.

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