Indian Sign Painting: A typeface designer's take on the craft

OK was originally a separate thing that used to occur in locations other than between the two words. I distinctly recall this from my childhood. Don't know the origins of it but there is some suggestion on the internet that it was copied from Tata trucks which had the logo of the OK soap (a lotus).

They could occur in the current order, but it was not necessary. It should still be read as separate from the "horn please" phrase.

As the country became functionally more illiterate over the years (yes, probably a controversial opinion :) ), the three words were just rote copied inline and painted on trucks, with the meaning lost to time.

I was told that this was the polite honk triplet - the two honk call and one honk response.

"honk honk" / "honk"

"horn ok" / "please"

During WW2, due to fuel shortages, Indian trucks often switched to Kerosene.

OK means: "On Kerosene". OK was painted on the back of trucks and other vehicles to warn other drivers to maintain a safe distance because Kerosene is highly flammable.

Due to another meaning of OK, they just kept doing it. [0]

[0]: https://www.fr8.in/blog/why-is-horn-ok-please-written-behind...

Yes, its quite thing even today. The banners tend to tear and fly away due to high winds.

So painting is still a thing in pretty much all over India. I even knew a neighbour who would do it. Like he painted our street address on our home. He also did many such things on highways.

Not sure if you know this, most such painters are illiterates and will have a hard time writing anything by hand. So its less of a font painting, more like a art form for them.

Only a while back, even movie posters were painted and quite honestly they would be stunning. I have seen them as a kid and would inspire awe.

On a tangential note, a classmate of mine had a flare for it, and he even did some projects with making huge mega massive stunning artistic displays with paint and thermocol, not sure what he is doing now, but back then those things looked quite impressive.

I learnt about IAST only after seeing how foreigners transcribe Sanskrit texts in Latin.

See this amazing article by a Polish journalist https://thediplomat.com/2021/01/spell-it-out-should-english-...

That should be 'aṅgrezī se hiṅdī' per IAST. In Devanagari: अंग्रेज़ी से हिंदी

If it were ñ instead of ṅ, the Devanagari would be अँग्रेज़ी से हिँदी which is incorrect.

It's true that the English language has a very large number of phonemes... but accents tend to regularize/restrict these phonemes. For example, a typical bilingual speaker of Indian English and Hindi will replace instances of the /æ/ phoneme (as in "blast" or "fast") with another phoneme like /a:/ (as in "father"). Which isn't that unusual since /æ/ is pretty uncommon among languages.

Other rare English phonemes include the dental fricatives, i.e. the "th" sounds in "ether" (voiceless) and "either" (voiced). Speakers of Indian English often replace this with a dental stop, a "t" sound (voiceless) or "d" sound (voiced). (Note that Devanagari has a _lot_ of stops, so this is one place where it cannot be cleanly encoded into the Latin alphabet without diacritics.)

So overall: while I think Devanagari can't encode e.g. American English, it can actually do a pretty solid job of encoding Indian English, but not the other way around.

As a Bollywood superstar famously quotes: English is a funny language.