New Project: తెలుగు

After seeing the Telugu script all over Hyderabad, I've decided that I want to try and learn it, at least in a basic way. I love learning languages, and they tell so much about the culture of a country or region, and bring you closer to its people. Telugu is the second most-spoken language in India, after Hindi, and is apparently referred to as the "Italian of the East" because every word ends in a vowel (okay, I found that on Wikipedia, but I'm sure people call it that. Maybe some more esoteric groups of linguists. Either way, I like the concept). It's spoken in the state of Andra Pradesh, in which Hyderabad is situated.

I've been taking Hindi at Wellesley, so I immediately found similarities between the two languages, especially in the script; they're both phonetic languages, so the way the word is written is exactly how it is pronounced (very unlike English). Telugu has a different script system to Hindi, but has almost the same sounds (variations of long and short vowels, both retroflex and dental consonants, consonant conjuncts, and vowels diacritics), except for the addition of a long e and long o that are not present in Hindi. This relationship comes from their similar linguistic roots. I found the greetings in both languages interesting: in Hindi, the greeting is namaste, and in Telugu, namaskaaramu. They both start with a similar root, and thereby convey a similar meaning (a much deeper and more spiritual one than just a simple "hello").

Of course, despite their cultural and regional proximities, the two languages certainly have differences. For a grammatical example, Telugu has seven different grammatical cases (more similar to Latin, which has six), whereas Hindi only has two. Because of this, Telugu is a "pro-drop" language, meaning that when speaking or writing, one can drop the subject of the sentence because the verb is attached to an ending that implies the person and number. This was the case in Latin, and remains to be the case in Spanish today--Hindi is not a pro-drop language (more similar to English in that way).

The Telugu word for "thank you" also stood out to me: dhanyavaadamulu. It's quite long, six syllables, which seemed oddly tedious for a word that is so common. I mentioned this Nora, who said jokingly, "I suppose that means you really have to mean it." I think maybe there's a little bit of truth to that; in English we throw the words "thank you" around without really thinking about what we're saying--we've even come so far as to abbreviate it to just one syllable, "thanks." Having such a long word might force the speaker to consider the significance of the gesture, instead of gratitude being a perfunctory response.

I know I can't teach myself a language completely. It takes immersion in the culture to really understand the relevance and colloquialness of the language. Mostly I want to be able to become familiar with the script so I can read it on billboards and signs. I also love writing in a different script. This little insight into the culture of Hyderabad will be a fun project for me, and will hopefully enrich my experience here.

Writing out the alphabet and some common words...in hindsight, I should have used pencil.