I could try to contribute too: My cache is full of eels, how do I set the death timer for the evictings of my tenants?
Video works because Hinglish is how tech-talk in (many, not all) companies works.
But you’d never see a technical doc in any of the these companies in Hindi, because you can’t even translate simple terms like Server or package-management. Even if you find acceptable translations, they aren’t immediately obvious, because nobody has heard them before.
In a Python video, you might hear: “मेरा code requests library से Google server को HTTP request भेजता हैं” (My code uses the requests library to send HTTP requests to Google”.
It works on video, but it doesn’t on text because nobody is used to reading this in Hindi in the first place.
When I was young I used to play some MSX games in Japanese, the language doesn't really matter for a lot of these 1980s games, and you would frequently see English words and terms written in Latin characters used all over the place.
Why won't this work for Hindi? Are people not familiar with these characters? Or is there just no tradition of doing so?
It happens in casual text - WhatsApp forwards, SMS messages. But for official writing - you pick a language and stick to it, as much as possible. This made more than a few notices impossibly hard to read when I was in college, because the Hindi felt archaic, even if it wasn't.
Other countries had a rich culture of research and scientific literature published in native languages. India never got that to a national scale, because India has hundreds of languages[0] so any efforts were local. A paper published in Tamil would be unreadable by folks a hundred miles away, so English became the technical lingua-franca of the nation (The colonial imposition didn't help either).
When a developer searches stack-overflow for an answer, english works better because it serves all developers in India.
[0]: India scores 0.914 on the Linguistic diversity Index, which ranges from 0 (everyone has the same mother tongue) to 1 (no two people have the same mother tongue)
In Dutch, I would just say "de server is kapot" ("the server is broken"). There is no attempt to translate words like "server" to Dutch. You see the same in Indonesian (standard Indonesian, Bahasa, there are many Indonesian languages) where these kind of words are just copied ad-verbatim from either English or (for older words) Dutch. For many technical terms in the IT world there are no "Dutch words": just the English ones. The exceptions seem to be the ones where there are Dutch words that are close enough to the English ones ("function" → "functie", "variables" → "variabelen"). Both languages having similar Germanic roots with Latin/Greek influences helps I suppose.
And in those cases all the languages use the same Latin script, so it's easier to include loanwords and technical terms.
So it seems to me, unless I'm misunderstanding something, that it's at least partly an issue of script translations? Adopting the example someone else posted, why shouldn't "नमस्ते आप कैसे हैं? मेरा server ओली हूँ" be considered acceptable Hindi?
We all know how Dutch people like to pronounce their Gs :)
> We all know how Dutch people like to pronounce their Gs :)
This depends on the regional accent; the south (and Belgium) has a "soft G", whereas the north (including Amsterdam, for example) has a "hard G".
This is a nice video on the topic with some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNOebbyUgI4
The "R" is also less hard in southern Dutch. Basically, it sounds a bit more like French rather than Klingon :-)
It's just that another phenomenon is the alphabeticising of Hindi (as in actually Hindi words) like 'namaste aap kaise hain? Mera naam Ollie hoon' (IAST āp, nām, olī, and hūñ) is a contrived sentence but the sort of thing someone might text if they didn't have the keyboard for नमस्ते आप कैसे हैं? मेरा नाम ओली हूँ or whatever reason.
It's quite annoying as a learner, since it can make it difficult to map back to devnagārī (resp. devnagari) to look up a new word, for example. (It's almost entirely true to say that devnagārī script is phonetic, so if you write कुछ and I don't know the word, I know how to pronounce it without knowing what it means, and can ask someone or look it up, which is a great feature that English of course doesn't have at all, and while Hindi phonetic approximation in the alphabet might get closer, it's still non-standard and different typers will spell words differently.)
Nobody bothers to use them.
Same for Urdu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Urdu
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