[WMASTERS] Auto Transliteration

[George Hart <ghart@socrates.berkeley.edu>]

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K. Srinivasan writes:

>In fact, translation between Hindi and Tamil will be much
>easier than between Hindi and Sanskrit!. Prof. Hart might
>perhaps comment on this. Even though Hindi might use a lot
>of Sanskrit words, there are a lot of structural and grammatic
>resemblences to Tamil and all other native Indian languages.
>

But we're talking about transliteration, not translation.  Tamils use
transliterated Sanskrit all the time -- of course, the various vargas (k,
kh, g, gh) fall together unless you use numbers (k, k2, k3, k4) in Tamil.
But it should be much easier to transliterate Sanskrit than Hindi because
Hindi has all sorts of Arabic and Persian sounds that have no equivalents
in Tamil -- of course, in Hindi these are indicated by a dot.

On another note, perhaps some of you have heard the old saw "There is no
word for 'face' in Tamil."  The idea is that Tamil uses mukam, which is
theoretically a Sanskrit word.  Pokorny, who wrote the Indogermanisches
Etymologisches Woerterbuch, the major dictionary for Indo-European,
believes the Sanskrit word mukha has a Dravidian origin (p. 751).  And the
DED also says it's Dravidian, though it doesn't claim a Dravidian origin
for the Sanskrit word.  It is interesting that Malayalam mistakenly treats
the word as a Sanskrit word and spells it mukham (the aspiration is
pronounced in fastidious Malayalam pronunciation).  GH.




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