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Comment by vinay427 | Hacker News Reader

> My personal theory is that this is because you can make every sound you hear in English using the Devnagari script, but not the other way around.

This is not very close to true. English (even a given accent) has a rather high number of phonemes, and they don’t overlap very closely with Hindi. What is probably more relevant here is that Devanagari is relatively phonetic so writing in it is useful to describe English pronunciations, more so than the English script is for Hindi (or English, for most unfamiliar words).

A very incomplete list of languages by approximate number of phonemes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...

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I think both you and GP are correct, but in different ways.

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.

Sounds like a reasonable theory but do you have an actual example? The one you gave:

> 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.

does not apply to Indian languages because most of them have daily-use-words with the /æ/ sound.

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