Hacker News Reader

Comment by GeneralMaximus | Hacker News Reader

Pretty easy for those used to writing in Hindi. Write a 'Ra' and a straight line across the middle.

You mean Devanagari. Hindi has no script of it's own. Few other Indian languages also use Devanagari. Eg: Sanskrit, Marathi, Konkani.

"A few" other Indian languages...

Conflating "few" and "a few" or "little" and "a little" is a common Indian English-ism, I find.

/Indian

Correct, articles are dropped and sometimes arbitrarily added; at least the 'the' is.

I wouldn't mind normally, but in the case of 'few' vs 'a few' it can be genuinely confusing because there is a drastic change of meaning.

You are right. By the time I saw your comment, the "edit" link had disappeared.

He likely means Hindi. It would be perfectly reasonable to say, e.g., “Pretty easy for those used to writing in English to write a $ symbol”.

That got me thinking: what would be the English equivalent? Latin alphabet? I’ve never heard anybody say that (outside of contexts were writing systems were explicitly discussed).

I often say "the Roman alphabet", which seems a bit odd. I suppose it's because I most frequently started talking about it in Japanese/Korean, where it's called "Roman letters".

A bit of googling says that it can be called both Roman and Latin.

Yay for trivia!

Romanji

Latin Alphabet and Arabic Numerals.

You mean Hindu Numerals[1]. The Arabs just passed on the Positional Notations on to the Europeans. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_sy...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com