I'm in India, and the recruiters are trying to make me apply. Even I was interested before, but after reading this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27569594. no thank you.
> Even I was interested before
To me as an American, often hearing "even" used this way by Indian coworkers, it's confusing. To me the sentence reads like this:
> Even I, who you would expected not to be interested, was interested
Something like it's an unexpected claim. This is confusing to me because there's no reason for me to expect that you, specifically, aren't interested. But in contexts like your sentence and talking with coworkers, it seems like the intended meaning is something like the following:
> I, too, was interested
Please don't take this the wrong way; this is just a question from somebody who's a fan of linguistics. I've encountered so many constructions in English from Indian speakers at work that I've never seen from other speakers (like the way "itself" is used [1]) that it makes me wonder where it's coming from. Based on my research so far, some things come from trying to carry over words/grammar from Indian languages, and some come from British English as used during colonization.
1: I often hear sentences like "today itself" to mean something like "today [emphasizing today]" which is not said in standard American English, in my experience
'trying to get me to apply' would be the right thing to say. A recruiter can't make you do anything. Your parents or spouse on the other hand...
Also, a lot of Indian English grammar rules are leftovers from Victorian England. For example, rarely would you see an Indian speaker use the word "too" after a verb for emphasis. But I see most of my American colleagues use that word way "too" much.
Your example of "Today itself", probably has roots in Hindi where "Aaj hi" is a commonly used term.
> Also, a lot of Indian English grammar rules are leftovers from Victorian England
This is about what I gathered from looking into the topic online. It's a fascinating thing to think about and makes total sense. Similar to how Korean and Japanese are influenced by Chinese, but the Chinese of centuries ago, not today.
Is "aaj hi" "today itself" or "itself"?
> Even [if] I was interested before, ... after reading this?