Richard Delacy - Mini Hindi Dictionary

MINI HINDI DICTIONARY HINDI -ENGLISH
ENGLISH- HINDI Richard Delacy Hindi in Contemporary South Asia Hindi, or Modern Standard Hindi as it is also known, is the joint official language of the Republic of India, along with English. Modern Standard Hindi is based on the dialect spoken in and around Delhi known as Khari Boli, or standing speech. In reality, however, Hindi may be considered an umbrella term for a multitude of spoken and literary registers employed by over 450 million people throughout the north of the Indian subcontinent, from Rajasthan in the west to Bihar in the east, and from the border with Nepal in the north to the border of Maharashtra in the middle of the country. It is quite difficult to pin down the tremendous number and variety of registers that exist in the northern states, even as Modern Standard Hindi is officially privileged as their standardized form. It is also true that the ways in which people speak are changing rapidly. For this reason, it is better to think of language as operating on a continuum across the length and breadth of north India, particularly when it comes to spoken forms, as well as the registers that are used in the burgeoning media.

The modern name of the language comes originally from Persian, and is related to Sindhu, a Sanskrit term for river and particularly the Indus River that flows through the state of Punjab in Pakistan. Both the words Hindi and Hindu were used by Persian speakers to describe the people and the languages on the east of the Indus River in the second millennium of the Common Era. Other words that were also in currency included Hindavi and Hindui. While Hindi has been associated with a tremendous number of spoken registers that have existed in a state of constant flux in north India for at least a millennium, the evolution of the language has been traditionally understood in terms of literature (both devotional and courtly) produced over the second millennium across this region. In histories of Hindi literature produced from the 19th century onwards, historians frequently underlined the importance of an impressive number of compositions by poets patronized in royal courts and in the form of devotional texts produced by Hindu saints, often in regional registers, as critical to the development of the modern language. At the same time, a modern literary style, predominantly written in the Devanagari script, came to be privileged as a medium of education and for some administrative tasks at lower levels of the bureaucracy during the colonial period.

Gradually this form came to be standardized and to gain further official recognition, in addition to being used in the emerging print media as well. Over the 19th and 20th centuries however, descriptions of Hindi came to be infused with a particular language politics, especially in regard to its relationship to Urdu and English. At the level of everyday speech, Hindi and Urdu are conventionally understood to be more or less mutually intelligible. At the literary level, however, Urdu ordinarily draws much more of its vocabulary from Persian and Arabic, and is conventionally written in a modified form of the Arabic script. English has occupied a contentious place in India since the colonial period, when it represented the language of colonial power and, over time, the language of the colonized elite classes. Given the vast number of different registers, and the pace at which languages are changing in contemporary South Asia, Hindi learning materials understandably focus more on written forms of language, such as those found in the media and in literary texts.

Over the years Hindi writers have conventionally drawn most heavily from Sanskrit, the classical language of Indian antiquity, for their vocabulary needs. Indeed, it is commonly accepted that the structure of Hindi and its core vocabulary emerged out of classical Sanskrit and later registers. In addition to this, many literary registers in Hindi have also drawn on a rich store of words from Persian and Arabic in particular. It is interesting to note that the influence of languages originating outside of South Asia on the languages of India tells us much about the fascinating history of contact between different peoples over the second millennium of the Common Era. This dictionary has been prepared from the perspective that the English-speaking learner of Hindi is more likely to need to consult such a resource when reading literary texts to look up the meaning of words that came into Hindi over the centuries from languages such as Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, etc. Of these by far the largest number of words come from Sanskrit.

Words of Sanskrit origin in Hindi appear broadly in two forms. The first is in the form that they occur in Sanskrit. In Hindi these words are known as tatsama words, that is, words in the same form as their Sanskrit originals. The second group is known as tadbhava words, that is, words that have the same meaning but a slightly different form to their Sanskrit originals. It is with this in mind that an effort has been made to include in this dictionary as many words as possible that may be encountered in the first years of learning Hindi, particularly in literary texts. The vast majority of these, for the reasons mentioned above, have come into Hindi from Sanskrit.

Perhaps the fewest number of words are included here from English, which does not reflect an effort to ignore or shun these words and their growing usage in Hindi, but recognizes that to be as practical as possible, this dictionary should include as many words as it can in order to read texts. An effort has been made to be as comprehensive as possible, following on from earlier dictionaries such as R. S. McGregors Hindi-English Dictionary (OUP), and Mahendra Chaturvedi and Bola Nath Tewaris wonderful A Practical Hindi-English Dictionary (National Publishing House, Delhi). How to Use This Dictionary Each character in Hindi represents a single syllable, and the dictionary order of these is arranged according to the point of articulation, from the back of the mouth to the front. The vowels appear first, followed by the consonants.

VOWELS CONSONANTS The same order is followed for every syllable in the word. For example, all words that begin with k will then be followed by all words that begin with: The vowels here appear in their modified forms () when combined with a consonant, replacing the inherent a a vowel that occurs with each consonant. This order is repeated for every syllabus in the word. Syllables in which there appears nasalization ( \ ) or a nasal consonant without its inherent a vowel (most often represented by a dot above the line at the top of the word), or the symbol that represents the reduplication of the vowel (:), appear at the beginning of that syllable. For example:

c' precedes c	c'cl ADJ fickle precedes ckm; M trick
g;\ precedes g;	g;\v M village precedes g;@ I F vehicle
d " precedes d	d " % M sorrow precedes da; F prayer

In the orthography occasionally the forms of consonants are modified and they are written together (conjunct consonants) to represent that a vowel is not pronounced with the first consonant. Syllables with conjunct consonants appear after syllables with the final vowel.Next page