Category talk:Braj language
Latest comment: 6 years ago by Metaknowledge in topic RFM discussion: April–December 2017
The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).
This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.
The language codes (bra and bgc) should be merged into Hindi and the categories should be deleted. I've moved all the entries into Hindi with appropriate dialect labels. —Aryamanarora (मुझसे बात करो) 15:50, 10 April 2017 (UTC)
- Why? They have ISO 693-3 codes, so they have an prima facie argument that they're separate languages, and entries should not be merged until there is agreement otherwise.--Prosfilaes (talk) 20:32, 10 April 2017 (UTC)
- That's not how this works. The ISO assigns codes without careful review, and makes all sorts of mistakes. We need to determine for ourselves what codes should actually exist. @-sche does the best work in that regard. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 00:07, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
- I appreciate Prosfilaes' point that it'd be helpful if Aryamanarora explained their case, though. :p And I don't disrespect the ISO; any group trying to give codes to all the world's thousands of languages is bound to make mistakes, including us! (Lately I've been thinking I was wrong to dismiss Mixed Great Andamanese as something that needs a code, and in the other direction, thinking about how to recalibrate our historically splittist handling of German lects...) Maybe some of our mergers seem as unhelpful to them as some of their splits (like Serbo-Croatian) seem to us. A dictionary attempting to define all the world's words does have some different considerations from a missionary organization trying to translate Bibles into something as close to every population's specific speech as possible.
- Perusing dozens of recent reference works (and ones from as far back as the 1800s) that turn up with a simple Google Books search, I see "Braj Bhasha" is usually considered a dialect of "Hindi" (with a few dissenters). Modern writers may switch from Hindi-proper to having characters use Braj forms much the same way writers in English might have characters use AAVE or Cockney. And Aryamanarora is a native speaker of Hindi saying the same thing, that it is a dialect. I will remove its code.
- (I had some concern, when first reading the Wikipedia article, that this might be a situation where the historical lect was more distinct than the modern lect of the same name, but many of the references are specifically saying the historical literature is a dialect of Hindi, with, again, a few dissenters who don't exactly say it's a separate language but just find it odd when people lump Braj, Hindi-proper and other Hindi dialects' literature all into one book of "Hindi literature".)
- For Haryanvi the situation is similar. Some references say the spoken form is more distinct from Hindi than the written form, which we could handle in pronunciation sections. But before I merge that, it might be wise to discuss the other Hindi lects: what should be done about Bundeli, Kannauji ("a lexical similarity of 83–94% with Hindi" per Ethnologue suggests a merger), Awadhi? Bagheli, Powari? (Chhattisgarhi, Surgujia?) - -sche (discuss) 04:05, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
- Awadhi and Chhattisgarhi should hands down be kept separate. When it comes to Braj and Haryanvi, and the others, it falls into an old trend in Indian linguistics to not be too particular with languages that aren't Sanskrit. The Prakrits, for all their genuine differences, are called one set of dialects, and the Apabhramshas too, which I would call quite laughable. And the large amount of borrowing across the Indo-Aryan languages makes underlying languages difficult to determine. The Indian government has pushed a policy of merging the "Hindi lects" and doesn't want to give them separate recognition should that make Hindi's case as the national language weaker. Many arguments are made, including by @Aryamanarora, have stated that the "higher vocabulary" is identical, but often that is even the case in Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, and Marathi due to the strength of prevalence of Sanskrit borrowings. And mutual intelligibility, which is often stated as another factor, arises from individuals knowing the differences and correspondences between different languages (or dialects). I would make a strong argument, that if one had no knowledge whatsoever (which is impossible to come by these days) of Hindi, then a Kannauji speaker would be hard-pressed to understand Hindi proper, and vice-versa, even in their written forms. DerekWinters (talk) 20:26, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
- There is no Hindi proper. There's Delhi Hindi, Hindustani, Persianized Hindi (some call it Urdu), Braj, Dakkhini, Old Hindi (still preserved in Hindu bhajans e.g. Om Jai Jagdish) an so on. I don't have any Indian nationalist aim or trying to "impose" Hindi, I just think Braj is not different enough from Hindi to be considered a language. R. S. McGregor has Braj and Awadhi forms in his "Hindi-English dictionary", and he is no Indian government mouthpiece. As for Prakrit, I think they are one language. See User:Aryamanarora/Prakrit (still incomplete), the differences in orthography are too regular to consider them (the 3 main dramatic Prakrits) as different languages, and I think the pronunciations would have been quite close when they were alive. Most of the English-language grammars treat them as a continuum of dialects.
- Furthermore, I am not even that well-versed in Hindi. I've lived in the United States for 9 years in a town where Hindi is very very uncommon; my Hindi is rusty. I still can understand Braj and Awadhi to a degree. —Aryamanarora (मुझसे बात करो) 20:36, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
- @Aryamanarora I'm not calling you a government lackey or anything, honestly. I was merely stating what the Indian government is doing. And Hindi proper refers to Standard Manak Hindi. DerekWinters (talk) 20:43, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
- @DerekWinters: We don't adhere to Manak Hindi though, we have entries like बस (bas), फ़र्ज़ (farz), आसमान (āsmān). These are all everyday words but they're borrowed from Persian and Arabic. Nobody actuallu speaks Manak Hindi, it's a purely written register that's only used in formal literature. Braj and Haryanvi are not Manak Hindi, but they are dialectical registers of Hindi, so there's no reason to count them as distinct languages. —Aryamanarora (मुझसे बात करो) 20:48, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
- Awadhi and Chhattisgarhi should hands down be kept separate. When it comes to Braj and Haryanvi, and the others, it falls into an old trend in Indian linguistics to not be too particular with languages that aren't Sanskrit. The Prakrits, for all their genuine differences, are called one set of dialects, and the Apabhramshas too, which I would call quite laughable. And the large amount of borrowing across the Indo-Aryan languages makes underlying languages difficult to determine. The Indian government has pushed a policy of merging the "Hindi lects" and doesn't want to give them separate recognition should that make Hindi's case as the national language weaker. Many arguments are made, including by @Aryamanarora, have stated that the "higher vocabulary" is identical, but often that is even the case in Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, and Marathi due to the strength of prevalence of Sanskrit borrowings. And mutual intelligibility, which is often stated as another factor, arises from individuals knowing the differences and correspondences between different languages (or dialects). I would make a strong argument, that if one had no knowledge whatsoever (which is impossible to come by these days) of Hindi, then a Kannauji speaker would be hard-pressed to understand Hindi proper, and vice-versa, even in their written forms. DerekWinters (talk) 20:26, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
- It appears to me that our Indic editors have decided to keep these separate. See this discussion for more. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 23:07, 28 December 2017 (UTC)