Basics of Hindi Language
Hindi belongs to the Indo-Aryan language group, which is a subset of the Indo-European group which also includes English. It is one of the official languages of India and is written in the Devanagari script. Hindi is spoken by over 480 million people in 16 different countries. While mastering the language could take years, you can learn to understand the basics and begin reading and writing the Hindi script relatively easily. (See Reference 3.)
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Script - Devanagari
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Devanagari consists of vowels, consonants, numbers and special characters. There are 57 sounds that make up the Hindi alphabet. Of the 57 sounds, there are 10 vowel sounds, 40 consonants, two modifiers, four conjunctive consonants and one special character. Hindi numbers are also written in script and follow a repeating pattern based on a 10-digit system like the English system. (See Reference 1.)
Gender and Case
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The majority of verbs in the Hindi language are modified to respect the gender of the subject. Gender is assigned to nouns, pronouns and indeclinable adjectives. There are two cases in Hindi, direct and oblique, and case is assigned to pronouns and indeclinable adjectives. (See Reference 2, Page 23.) For gender, masculine forms typically end in 'a' whereas feminine forms typically end in 'i' with exceptions for plural words. (See Reference 1.)
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Syntax
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Word order, or syntax, does not follow the same pattern in the Hindi language as it does in English. In the Hindi language, verbs are placed at the end of the sentence and post-positions are used instead of prepositions. For example, in English a sentence would read, "Her daughter is young"; however, in Hindi the same sentence would read, "Her daughter young is." (See Reference 2, Page 184.)
Pronunciation
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Hindi is a phonetic language, so each character's sound is the same as it would be pronounced when reading words, and the sound are always pronounced the same, unlike English letters. (See Reference 3.) Some sounds are nasalized and some are aspirated, in addition to sounds you will already be familiar with from English letters. (See Reference 1.)
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References
Resources
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