A major modern South Asian language, Hindi is spoken and understood by more than half a billion people in India and in other parts of the world where the Indian diaspora has settled. The language is written in Devanagari, a script derived from the ancient Brahmi...
In this article Neha Tiwari talks about her journey of learning Nastaliq. Learning Urdu is akin to time travel. The learner — otherwise seldom in contact with Urdu-speaking environments — suddenly finds herself transported to the gleeful streets of the...
Ciao! Namaste! Zabaan is excited to welcome three interns from Italy as part of a partnership with Sarasvati Association, a newly born cultural non-profit organization that promotes the development of Indian studies and research in Italy. They join us from Ca’ Foscari...
Although spoken English is quite easy to learn, a fact that certainly in part helped to make it the most commonly learnt second language on the planet, English is also one of the toughest languages for any learner to master, native or not, as far as its spelling is...
The Iliad is a Greek epic poem of 15,693 lines composed sometime during the first half of the 7th century BC on the shores of Asia Minor and the very first record of poetic activity in the west. And what a start it is! The work is named after Ilios, an alternative...
This article is a sister article to the earlier 101 articles treating features of word-formation Hindi has inherited from Sanskrit. Features discussed in those articles are: vowel sandhi, vowel gradation, prefixes and suffixes. In the present article students and...
Learning, in acting as a basis for our personal choices, decisions and actions, determines the difference between what we become and do not become. It helps to shape the inarticulate hum of the universal consciousness, present in all that exists and in each of us,...
The Hindi word for dictionary, शब्दकोश (śabdkośa), literally means word-chest. Apart from accurately describing the function of a dictionary, the word also aptly illustrates the fundamental problem language students face upon first opening the dictionary of a new...
