Times Of India Ridicules Tamil, Apologize.

In a news story published  on 9th June 2012, The Times of India, titled ‘ New cartoon Row,this one on Anti-Hindi Riots’  has published a blurb in the story . calling Tamil as ‘Tongue Twister ‘Where it en-capsules the anti Hindi agitation .

This portion is not available in the On Line version.

” Even before the din over a school textbook cartoon of B R Ambedkar had died down, a fresh row erupted over a cartoon on the anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu.

MDMK chief Vaiko on Friday shot off a letter to Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal, seeking the removal of a cartoon in the NCERT class XII political science textbook because it distorted history and hurt Tamil sentiments. PMK leader S Ramadoss joined in to say the cartoon insulted the protests in the 1960s over imposition of Hindi in education that left eight people dead.

“The cartoon depicts Tamil students in poor light” portraying them as “merely indulging in violence”, Vaiko said in his letter to Sibal and NCERT director Parvin Sinclair .

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/New-cartoon-row-this-one-on-anti-Hindi-riots/articleshow/13941979.cms

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Cartoon-row-Vaikos-protest-may-kick-up-political-storm-in-TN/articleshow/13941403.cms

For a glorified Dialect, a Language, especially Tamil is no doubt a ‘Tongue Twister’

It is an insult to the Tamil Language as well as Tamils.

If the Times of India were to cover the news item it is welcome.

But why insult a language?

Even the tone of the news item, if one were to carefully read it, one would know that thee is a derisive tone.

If you want to write on Anti Hindi agitation , write it,why call the language as a tongue twister, especially when there is no reason for you to provide the blurb which has nothing to do with the news provided under the head.

If one were to go by the History of Linguistics Hindi, it stands nowhere near Tamil.

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Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi (Devanagari: मानक हिन्दी; meaning “Standard Hindi”),High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardised and sanskritised register of the Hindi-Urdu language based on theKhariboli dialect of Delhi and Western Uttar Pradesh. It is one of the official languages of the Republic of India.

Colloquial Standard Hindi is mutually intelligible with another register of Hindustani language called Urdu. Mutual intelligibility decreases in literary and specialized contexts which rely on educated vocabulary. Due to religious nationalism and communal tensions, speakers of both Hindi and Urdu frequently assert that they are distinct languages, despite the fact that native speakers generally cannot tell the colloquial languages apart. The combined population of Hindi-Urdu speakers is the fourth largest in the world.^[4] However, the number of native speakers of Standard Hindi is unclear. According to the 2001 Indian census,^[5] 258 million people in India reported their native language to be “Hindi”. However, this includes large numbers of speakers of Hindi dialects besides Standard Hindi; as of 2009, the best figure Ethnologue could find for Khariboli dialect was a 1991 citation of 180 million.^[1]

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History

The dialect upon which Standard Hindi is based is khariboli, the vernacular of Delhi and the surrounding western Uttar Pradesh and southernUttarakhand region. This dialect acquired linguistic prestige in the Mughal Empire (17th century) and became known as Urdu, “the language of the court.” As noted and referenced in History of Hindustani, prior to the 17th century, it was not referred to not as Urdu but Hindustani. After independence, the Government of India set about standardising Hindi as a separate language from Urdu, instituting the following conventions:^{[original research?]}

• standardization of grammar: In 1954, the Government of India set up a committee to prepare a grammar of Hindi; The committee’s report was released in 1958 as “A Basic Grammar of Modern Hindi”
• standardization of the orthography, using the Devanagari script, by the Central Hindi Directorate of the Ministry of Education and Culture to bring about uniformity in writing, to improve the shape of some Devanagari characters, and introducing diacritics to express sounds from other languages.

[edit]Sanskrit vocabulary

Formal Standard Hindi draws much of its academic vocabulary from Sanskrit, and has looked to Sanskrit for borrowing from at least the 15th century BC. Standard Hindi loans words are classified into five principal categories:

• Tatsam (तत्सम / same as that) words: These are words which are spelled the same in Hindi as in Sanskrit (except for the absence of final case inflections).^[9] They include words inherited from Sanskrit via Prakrit which have survived without modification (e.g. Hindustani nām/Sanskrit nāma, “name”; Hindustani Suraj/Sanskrit Surya, “sun”),^[10] as well as forms borrowed directly from Sanskrit in more modern times (e.g. prārthanā, “prayer”).^[11] Pronunciation, however, conforms to Hindi norms and may differ from that of classical Sanskrit. Among nouns, the tatsam word could be the Sanskrit uninflected word-stem, or it could be the nominative singular form in the Sanskrit nominal declension.
• Ardhatatsam (अर्धतत्सम) words: These are words that were borrowed from Sanskrit in the middle Indo-Aryan or early New Indo-Aryan stages.^{[citation needed]} Such words typically have undergone sound changes subsequent to being borrowed.
• Tadbhav (तद्भव / born of that) words: These are words which are spelled differently from Sanskrit but are derivable from a Sanskrit prototype by phonological rules (e.g. Sanskrit karma, “deed” becomes Pali kamma, and eventually Hindi kām, “work”).^[9]
• Deshaj (देशज) words: These are words that were not borrowings but do not derive from attested Indo-Aryan words either. Belonging to this category are onomatopoetic words.
• Videshī (विदेशी) words: these include all words borrowed from sources other than Indo-Aryan. The most frequent sources of borrowing in this category have been Persian, Arabic, Portuguese and English.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Hindi
• Note that Hindi in the present format came into being in 17th Century during the Moghul Empire.
• And which Hindi are we speaking about?

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Related articles

• NCERT textbook cartoon stokes anger in Tamil Nadu (thehindu.com)