लबेलीा

[lobelia321]

Look! I spelled my name in Devanagari script!

My Hindi lessons are progressing apace. I also bought myself a Teach Yourself Sanskrit book, not because I'm now also learning Sanskrit but because the grammar fascinates me. Grammar fascinates me, anyway, and Sanskrit is the root of nearly all the languages I know, including Latin and my mother tongue German. It has even more grammatical rules than Latin and is a superb language.

The only thing is: Devanagari definitely doesn't follow QWERTY keyboard rules and it's darn difficult to find the bloody keys on the keyboard.

Comments

[ileliberte.livejournal.com]

I saw this post surfing friendsfriends, and just had to comment. Do you mind me asking how you managed to have Devanagari script show up on your post? I would love to be able to do that. Also, Sanskrit is really fascinating and makes me nostalgic for schooldays, but declensions are totally insane, especially the words that don't follow the nice little patterns that others do. Still have semi-nightmares about reciting Gaja Gajou Gajaah over and over...

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Hey, ileliberte! I got the Devanagari script into Livejournal by switching to 'Devanagari' in the Languages menu of my Apple iBook. I accessed the Languages menu by going to System Preferences / International, and then dragging the requisite icons to the toolbar top right hand corner of my desktop (next to the date and time, and the battery indicator). The only problem is that the Devanagari script is keyed into the keyboard in a way I don't understand so that it took me a long time to find each letter on my keyboard.

Did you learn Sanskrit at school then?? That's very unusual. My husband's alma mater high school in Australia pioneered the teaching of Sanskrit but normally it's Latin and Greek that's taught in the way of 'dead' languages. Although it seems to me that if you want to sharpen your understanding of grammar, Sanskrit is an even better language to do it with than Latin or Greek. What is gaja gajou...? Does that have to do with 'go'?

[ileliberte.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info!

I grew up in India, so in grades 8 and 9, I had a third language option of either Sanskrit or Hindi, and I chose Sanskrit :) Gaja=elephant (short a pronunciation, not like in Gaza). It was a whole table of different forms the word would take depending on subject, object, singular, plural, whatever on earth you can think up. And it was basically charts and charts of word forms since not all the words that ended similarly had similar forms of declension. It was interesting, but also, really intense.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Sanskrit is so fascinating! I have a Teach Yourself Sanskrit book that I peruse with great fascination. The alphabet has hardly changed at all from Sanskrit to Hindi. I am fascinated by how everything gets compressed into one long word. Gaja = elephant, that is very interesting. I will look up the book again to find your different declensions.

[msilverstar]

Indic, a word I just learned for the whole family of scripts!

If you're still on a Mac, the View menu should have a Special Characters item and you can switch fonts and see where the keys are.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip, Ms! I looked at 'View' in Safari but that doesn't have what you described. Hang on, I'll just go and look in 'View' in Word. No. What I do have is a Language icon in the top right hand corner of my desktop but it doesn't give me a keyboard lay-out just a 'character palette' which simply lists all the special sorts. I might just have to experiment and make a little diagram on a post-it or something.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Aha! And when I switch to Devanagari in the Languages menu and then try and type something in Word, all I get is boxes! It only works when I type into LJ. Hm.