Talk:Nepali language/Archive 1

A little help please
can anyone translate this to Khas Nepali? It's for a short story I'm working on.

"I got the bugger...I got him good!"

The idea is that the person saying this was angry at someone who insulted him, and proceeded to beat the crap out of that someone, and then uttered the above things for good measure.

Do help me out. I'd very much appreciate it. I'll delete this as soon as I get some feedback. Thanks

-joebeez

...
This looks like a badly formatted dictionary. Wikipedia is not a dictionary. On the other hand, there are several other similiar lists for other languages. Remove it or fix it? -- JeLuF 13:47 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)

To avoid possible copyright violation I remove the previous version as it contained unformated text of phrasebook (inserted by authors?). The original version can be found at If you know that authors granted the right to use this text in Wikipedia feel free to revert the change. Here's a stub instead... Youandme

Nepal Bhasa

 * Halló! Is this the same ? Best regards Gangleri | Th | T 16:20, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Excellent question. They are different languages despite the potential confusion: Nepali vs. Nepal Bhasa.

Nepali is an indo-european language originally spoken in far western Nepal by Khas peoples who gradually migrated eastward and became militarily and political dominant, and Nepali became the national language although it is a second language for about half the population.

Nepal Bhasa, more commonly called Newa bhasha is the Tibeto-Burman language spoken by the Newa nationality that is indigenous to the Kathmandu Valley. "Nepal" originally meant just the Kathmandu valley with its three ancient cities (originally kingdoms) Kathmandu on the west, Patan on the south, and Bhaktapur on the east, to which one might add a smaller city or town Banepa further east on the rim of the valley.

Newa were farmers, craftsmen and merchants. As merchants they controlled trans-himalayan trade with Lhasa (the capital of Tibet) and have developed bazaars throughout the Middle Hills. However their language is not spoken by other ethnic groups or widely taught and is perhaps in some danger of disappearing.

can any one give the reference that shows the time period when the word "Nepal Bhasha" is mentioned? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Anju273 (talk • contribs) 20:11, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Help add input for Naming conventions (Indic)
Help add input for Naming conventions (Indic)--Dangerous-Boy 04:46, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

translators needed at WikiProject India/Translation
WikiProject India/Translation--D-Boy 19:30, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Number of native speakers is wrong
What is the source for 40 million? Ethnologue estimates the total number of speakers at 17 million.. I sincerely doubt that Nepal (with a total population of about 11 million) and the speakers in Southern Bhutan could sum to 40 million. If no one objects I will change this soon. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.253.56.183 (talk) 16:05, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Um, where did you get the number 11 million as the population of Nepal? As of several years ago it was about 25 million and Wikipedia has it at 28 million for 2007. I think if you count speakers in India (of Nepali descent, on the border, etc) you would have quite a few. So, if you don't think it's 40 million, that's one thing...but changing it to 17 million is illogical.

It should be more than 40 millions now. By the crude estimate (based on recent indian census), population belonging to nepali origin is more than 20 millions. so any one who want to correct the figure, should make it to 45 million —Preceding unsigned comment added by Anju273 (talk • contribs) 20:14, 29 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Nepali origin is not equivalent to napali speaking. Only about half of the population of Nepal speaks nepali, and a smaller part of nepali origin elsewhere speak it.  The source cited estimates the number at 17 million.  I will change the info box to 17 million until some one gives another source that estimates a different number. Bcharles (talk) 21:44, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

Mutual Intelligibility?
Is Hindi really mutually intelligible with Nepali? It might more a case of Nepali people learning Hindi from Bollywood movies than the two language being mutually intelligible. Hindi is quickly learnable with minimum effort by a Nepali speaker, but if a Nepali and and an Indian with no previous contact with each others language or culture were to talk, they would not fully understand each other.


 * It's a moot point because the two languages and cultures are in contact. There can be few native speakers of Nepali who are not constantly exposed to Hindi and Indian culture, and probably few Hindi speakers in the Indian Terai who don't have significant contact with Nepalis.  In practice, the time it takes to cross the zone of linguistic ambiguity by any means except flight is sufficient to start making sense of the other language, provided one makes a reasonable effort. LADave (talk) 03:12, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

How can "roughly half of the population of Nepal speaks Nepali as a mother tongue...?"
According to population Statistics of Nepal 2006, following are major ethnic groups in Nepal:

Population by major Ten Caste/Ethnic groups (in percent), 2001. Chhetri 15.80 Brahman 12.74 Magar 7.14 Tharu 6.75 Tamang 5.64 Newar 5.48 Muslim 4.27 Kami 3.94 Yadav 3.94 Rai 2.79

How can this statement roughly half of the population of Nepal speaks Nepali language as mother tongue be true. It seems as if only around one third of Nepalese speak Nepali language as mother tongue according to Statistical figure of Central Bureau of statistics of Nepal. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kathmandu2007 (talk • contribs) 22:15, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Its likely the lower caste - ie not Bahun or Chetri - speakers of Nepali that make up the rest of those numbers, for example Dalits. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.66.192.217 (talk) 04:59, 31 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Note that the given percents only add up to about 70. Brahmans and Chhetris are Nepali speakers almost by definition -- provided "Brahman" actually means "hill Brahman" with Brahmans in the Terai counted elsewhere.  In other ethnic groups, parents with sufficient education in Nepali may abandon their ethnic language in the manner of immigrant parents forcing their children to use English.  In this way many of Nepal's ethnic languages are dying out.  Teaching your children an unwritten local language with only hundreds to thousands of speakers is admirable in a sense, but not terribly practical. Many bewail this, but neither the national government nor international aid programs have underwritten the Nepalese equivalent of Gaeltachts where local languages can be preserved. LADave (talk) 03:35, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Dialects
Should characteristics of Nepali dialects be included in the article? More specifically, the singaporean Gurkha-Contingent dialect (i would consider it a seperate dialect because there is only a very strained mutual intelligibility with us and the nepal bred). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wretchedapeman (talk • contribs) 22:17, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Casr
"Beside this some casr and religions use their own language as their first language" What is the meaning of "casr"? Does anyone know? Hyper3 (talk) 09:26, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Looks like a typo. Probably meant to write "castes". For example potter's caste "Kumal" has its own language or dialect. Tharus have their own languages. Muslims in the Terai are likely to speak Hindi, Awadhi, etc. more than Nepali (but then so are their Hindu counterparts). Buddhists tend to speak Newari or some other indigenous "Tibeto-Burman" language. Generally ethnicity, religion, caste and language are pretty strongly correlated. --LADave (talk) 19:55, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

The history section is politically motivated. While the author, probably indian or british, has failed utterly to describe gorkhali heroics in expanding country to sutlej, even beyond the ancient nepalese frontier along the holy ganges, he has very cunningly written a buffer state for nepal. The fact remains that both 30000 strong Chinese army and 35000 strong british army failed to overcome the resistance of 10000 strong Gorkha army and had to flee some battlefields. As for the eastern conquest is concerned, the then Gorkhali army halted eastern campaign of securing the ancient (5th century) border at Kamarupa, Assam, only because of the presence of Nepali speaking settlers in Bhutan and Assam.202.70.79.10 (talk) 12:01, 23 December 2009 (UTC)user: khanalsar

The history section was politically motivated, in the same way that your comment was. we (gorkhalis) expanded the country to sutlej... whether it was heroic or not is a matter of opinion. Also, i do not say that you have your facts wrong, but i see that you are seeing it the way you want to... nepal lost a lot of key strongholds in the anglo-nepal war, which forced us to sign a treaty with the east india company in which we lost 2/3rd of our land...not to mention the military tribute that had to be paid to the british (i.e. gurkha regiment). And any unbiased article will see nepal as a de facto buffer state. Please advise the author on how to make this article better and accurate, and not speculate on his heritage. Thats not what nepali people do ;) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.189.224.109 (talk) 23:07, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Proposed merge with Translations from Nepali to Other languages
No clear reason for an article duplication/split. AllyD (talk) 06:22, 6 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Merging, not that there's much to merge. — kwami (talk) 05:47, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Khas Nepali language materials
Madhyacandrik (1919)

https://archive.org/details/madhyacandrik00sharuoft

https://archive.org/details/illustrationsofl00hodg_0

https://archive.org/details/illustrationsofl00hodg

Khas Nepali English dictionaries

http://books.google.com/books?id=bKLI6V8V9vYC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=Tp1-IFixElsC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Rajmaan (talk) 04:49, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Persian v. Arabic
The following is a copypaste of comments made on my userpage:

Sorry, but the Rv you made here is wrong, as both Shahid and Qanun are Arabic words (though the latter is even a deriviation ultimately from Greek even, as we see). It will thus be reinstated.

Bests - LouisAragon (talk) 05:22, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Well, no, you are wrong. See, the language of the courts of the Islamicate world east of Baghdad was Persian, and often Persian West of there as well, for like a thousand years. In areas where people weren't Arabic speakers, but did speak Persian, the language they borrowed words from was Persian, and thus those words are Persian, not Arabic. These were Persian speakers and writers. "Words like sahid and kanun came from Persian" is actually correct. If you are going to be pedantic, you'd have to say kanun was borrowed from Greek, as it is the Greek word κανών; this is true of an epic ton of Arabic words that have made their way into common usage (and even those that have not, like "spouse" zawj). Persian literature is the origin of these words, and to claim that they aren't actually Persian is just wrong in the same way that claiming Latinate or French words used in English that have been borrowed into Japanese are somehow "not English". Ogress 17:41, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm going to even expand on that to note that scholars refer to these loanwords as Persian or Perso-Arabic if you look at sources, and sometimes "Persian and Arabic": Features in Phonology and Phonetics, The Indo-Aryan Languages. So perhaps we can compromise and note that they are Arabo-Persian or Arabic through Persian, as Arabic was often not used outside of the actual Quran in the Persianate world, where even the daily prayers were in Persian, and the epic literature and common songs were also in Persian. Ogress 17:47, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

Add something about writing/script?
It looks like Nepali is written with the Devanagari script, but I was not able to find any mention of writing in the article. Perhaps this information could be added? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.12.228.50 (talk) 23:59, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Archaic usage of "vocable"
The reference to a 19C essay said "...in eight-tenths of its vocables, substantially Hindi" -- but it is clear from following the wl that this is an archaic usage, which is not helpful to readers. I changed this to: "...in eight-tenths of its vocabulary, substantially Hindi". Now strictly, this might be a misinterpretation, because he might have meant "80% of utterances", rather than 80% of (distinct!) words. But is "utterances" exactly right? Couldn't we just use "words"? Not sure, so I invite comments. Imaginatorium (talk) 07:45, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

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