
Mother Tongues - prismatic
http://slavenorth.com/columns/sanskrit.htm
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mr_overalls
I'm fascinated by these words that describe pieces of our lived experience in
a way that makes us say, "I knew there was a word for this!" They seem similar
to the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, but in a semantic sense.

A few from English that I like:

curglaff - the shock felt in bathing when one first plunges into the cold
water

groak - to silently watch someone while they are eating, hoping to be invited
to join them

~~~
pliftkl
I'm not sure of the spelling, and I'm sure I'd butcher it, but Thai has a word
for "the overwhelming urge to pinch a baby because it's so damn cute". My wife
uses it on a regular basis when we're out and about and she sees babies.

~~~
eisrep
The Philippines (Tagalog) has a word with basically the same meaning--gigil.
It's pretty interesting to learn another language has a word for the same
feeling because there isn't really a fit in English.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Thailand isn't so far away from the Philippines.

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jff
I'm a little puzzled at his complaint that he can't transliterate Devanagari;
although I've only learned some of the basics as I attempt to learn Hindi,
it's not particularly challenging--it's just an alphabet (alphasyllabary if
you want to be pedantic)

~~~
chetanahuja
Devnagri script, which is used for a bunch of Indian languages including
Hindi, is probably the simplest to transliterate. Each letter has a pretty
well defined pronunciation with very rare exceptions. Vowels are completely
regular and always have the same sound in all words with no exceptions (that I
can think of). It should be pretty easy to write some simple logic in a few
hundred lines of code to do this automatically... with the main difficulty
being the target language rather than the source language.

~~~
jff
One of my friends once told me, "We don't have spelling bees in India... it
wouldn't make sense, when you hear the word there's really only one way to
spell it."

I on the other hand can't hear the difference between Hindi "b", "v", "g", and
"k" half the time :)

~~~
chetanahuja
Well the Hindi alphabet has 52 letters with 28 "pure" consonants (which
multiply with some modifiers). See here:
[http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hindi.htm](http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hindi.htm)
Some other Indian languages have additional consonants that are not familiar
to predominantly Hindi speakers. The key thing is that the written alphabet
seems to have been designed to accurately represent _all_ of those sounds.
It's hard (actually impossible) to map all these to Roman alphabet.

