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Comment by tnsittpsif | Hacker News Reader

Speak Hindi all day, but cannot guess a single letter in a 100 tries!

Shows how much this language's usage in writing and reading has declined.

I'm also a native Hindi speaker and I've never in my life used the word which is the correct answer. The game creator should have chosen more popular words.

I’m in the US and very rarely speak Hindi let alone read it and got it in the first try. I thought it’s a very common word, no?

Do most Hindi speakers now use the Latin script?

Yes, and it's awful because it isn't standardized. Current generations frequently use only consonants to type out a word and I have no idea how to pronounce them. For example "hai" (pronounced "hey") roughly translates to "is". I literally see kids typing a singular "h" instead.

For most Indian languages you can use IAST & can use an IAST keyboard, as it transliterates sanskrit based letters precisely. Though I don’t know why people don’t just use the original scripts as they are much more beautiful and you can find (virtual) keyboards for them even for ios & android.

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

Welp, don't get me started on the "hai"->"h" contractions! The one that irks me the most is अच्छा (good, pronounced "uh-ch-aah" with a hard and emphasized "ch") is written as "axa" in chats (more popularly written as "achha").

I am old! "Axa" is seriously everything that is wrong with the way newer generations are using the language with English alphabets! I still cannot believe people do this.

I have personally set a standard or a set of rules for writing Hindi using English alphabets myself and I have seen my friends follow the same. We do not use such shortcuts/shortforms.

Hell, even "Acha" is not the correct way. It must be "Achha" (double Hs).

Depends a lot on the medium and the demographic. Twitter has a lot of native Hindi users, and there’s more on some platforms such as Sharechat which focus on Indic languages.

Twitter even does a good enough job of translating Hindi written in the Devnagri script. Doesn’t work if you use Latin script obviously.

Not really. news channels, print media, billboards, internet websites use devanagari script. But in Messenger apps, FB, Telegram, people use latin script.

devanagari is not meant for such puzzles

In what way is it not meant for puzzles, as opposed to English?

The Latin Alphabet treats vovels and consonants equally, whereas alphasyllabaries treat vovels differently. It's much easier to construct letter games if all the letters are more or less the same. Add to that the complexity that ligatures bring. Plus the number 9f letters should be small so that games like scrabble are more reasonable

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