????Cash Cows for Hindi teachers?????

[r.l.schmidt at easteur-orient.uio.no]

Reply to Richard Barz' reply to Zydenbos' reply to Wujastyk:

>It's fashionable in some circles, for ideological and other reasons, to
>indulge in Hindi-bashing.  But, sorry, it just isn't true that "the
>>percentage of the Indian population with whom one can have an intelligent
>>conversation in Hindi is very limited indeed".  In fact, if one ignores
>>the artificial divisions between Hindi, filmi Hindi, Hindustani and Urdu
>>and just calls it all Hindi, then Hindi is the only South Asian language
>>in which one can have any kind of conversation, intelligent or not, any
>>where in India, Pakistan or Nepal.  In fact, since English really is the
>>language of a tiny elite, Hindi is the only language in which one can have
>>any chance of having a conversation anywhere in India.  Naturally, Tamil,
>>Gujarati, Bengali and so on are fine languages every bit the equal of
>>Hindi but none of them have any where near the geographical and cultural
>>spread of Hindi.
>
>Richard Barz
>Richard.Barz at anu.edu.au

--I am a teacher of Urdu (and to a certain extent of Hindi) by profession,
but contest Richard Barz' statement. I will restrict myself to a subject on
which I can speak from experience: Nepali. Hindi is not the cultural
language of Nepal, Nepali is, and it has the vocabulary and grammatical
flexibility to handle all the topics I could think of discussing during a
two year stay (doing lexicographic research). The more abstract vocabulary
comes mostly from Sanskrit, but so does that of Hindi.

With best wishes,

Ruth Schmidt