Month: January 2010

Gather around, children, because we are going to talk about the Devanagari alphabet today. We are interested in the consonants, not the vowels. So, here are the consonants:

क ख ग घ ङ

च छ ज झ ञ

ट ठ ड ढ ण

त थ द ध न

प फ ब भ म

य र ल व

श ष स ह

I’ve intentionally dropped the ळ क्ष ज्ञ because anyway they are poor cousins that we don’t want to throw out on the streets.

Anyway, have you ever wondered why the alphabet is always written out as a 2-dimensional table like this? Compare that with the English alphabet which is pretty much a one-dimensional sequence of alphabets without any organizational structure. There are obviously strong reasons why the devanagari alphabet is arranged in a table like this.

To get a hint, focus on the first 5 rows above. First, say aloud the letters in any one of the horizontal rows (top 5 only). Notice any similarities? Now say aloud the letters in any vertical column (just the first 5 rows). Again, notice any similarities?

Before I give the answer, here is a full table, organized according to phonetics, taken from the Wikipedia page on Devanagari

	sparśa (Stop)								anunāsika (Nasal)		antastha (Approximant)		ūṣma/saṃghashrī (Fricative)
Voicing →	aghoṣa				ghoṣa								aghoṣa		ghoṣa
Aspiration →	alpaprāṇa		mahāprāṇa		alpaprāṇa		mahāprāṇa		alpaprāṇa				mahāprāṇa
kaṇṭhya (Guttural)	क	ka /k/	ख	kha /kʰ/	ग	ga /ɡ/	घ	gha /ɡʱ/	ङ	ṅa /ŋ/					ह	ha /ɦ/
tālavya (Palatal)	च	ca /c,t͡ʃ/	छ	cha /cʰ,t͡ʃʰ/	ज	ja /ɟ,d͡ʒ/	झ	jha /ɟʱ,d͡ʒʱ/	ञ	ña /ɲ/	य	ya /j/	श	śa /ɕ,ʃ/
mūrdhanya (Retroflex)	ट	ṭa /ʈ/	ठ	ṭha /ʈʰ/	ड	ḍa /ɖ/	ढ	ḍha /ɖʱ/	ण	ṇa /ɳ/	र	ra /r/	ष	ṣa /ʂ/
dantya (Dental)	त	ta /t̪/	थ	tha /t̪ʰ/	द	da /d̪/	ध	dha /d̪ʱ/	न	na /n/	ल	la /l/	स	sa /s/
oṣṭhya (Labial)	प	pa /p/	फ	pha /pʰ/	ब	ba /b/	भ	bha /bʱ/	म	ma /m/	व	va /ʋ/

If you read any row horizontally, you’ll notice that your lip position and tongue position remains the same, and only the method of expelling air from your voice box, nose and mouth changes. It remains exactly the same for the first 5 columns (until the nasals), and then changes slightly for the last row (the aproximant or the fricative).

If you read any column vertically, you’ll notice that the way air comes out of our mouth/nose/voicebox remains the same and only the tongue/lip position changes.

Also, I’m sure, this is the first time many of you have figured out how to correctly pronounce ङ and ञ. (Actually, my Hindi teacher in primary school taught us that ञ is the sound made by a small child crying, and ङ is an even smaller child crying. So, obviously, none of us had any clue how exactly one is supposed to pronounce those letters.) And, also, I’m sure there are many who have now figured out the difference between श and ष for the first time. (“They are ‘same’,” is what I believed for many years due to the same Hindi teacher…)

I'm really unsure of what the right approach for me is, and would like to hear opinions of people.

Last month, I created http://ForPune.com, a website for questions and answers about Pune. It is catching on quite nicely, and has garnered 161 questions in just over a month, and most of the questions have good answers. A nice community of regulars and irregulars is building around it. I, as the founder-cum-moderator-cum-administrator, and the other early active members of the community will end up defining the character of the community – by subtly or explicitly encouraging or discouraging certain behaviors, and by making some people feel welcome and some people feel unwelcome. For example, questions that seem like thinly veiled attempts at self-promotion quickly get voted down by the community. And that's a good thing.

However, consider the following sequence of events on this question. Regular user @drbhooshan does not believe in homeopathy and left a sarcastic answer. I have also in the past made no secret of the fact that I don't believe in homeopathy. So I tweeted that I found the answer funny. But @sroy_sroy (in a DM) and @kshashi called me on it. To  quote @kshashi:

You cannot create a community by discouraging a genuine participant. http://bit.ly/8XpKAu

This is an important and valid point. Irrespective of what I and drbhooshan think of homeopathy, the question was a valid and genuine question, and there were valid and genuine answers that were useful to the original question. In that mix, drbhooshan's answer was not the correct answer, and deserved to be voted down, instead of voted up. Truly, a community is not created by discouraging a genuine participant. I repented. (Although the system does not allow me to undo my +ve vote, since a certain amount of time has already passed.)

But now, I'm wondering. As a moderator/admin I have a greater responsibility towards making people feel welcome. But for that should I be really hiding my personal opinions? On the one hand, I can argue that the community deserves to see the real me, not a carefully crafted, all-welcoming, well-rounded, PR-approved persona. On the other hand, if the real me is a misanthropic jerk, then a community will never really get formed. So where do I draw the line? How do I separate my moderator/admin duties (which should be impartial and based on published site guidelines) and my personal opinions (which should have the same weightage as any other user). Since everyone knows I'm the moderator/admin, can I really ever be 'any other user'? Any suggestions? Experiences?

(Note: This post is not intended to be a pro-homeopathy vs anti-homeopathy discussion, so please keep that aspect out of your comments, as it will unnecessarily distract from the main issue I'm trying to bring out. Thanks.)

Posted via email from Navin’s posterous

These are excerpts from this O'Reilly Radar post by (Jim Stogdill | @jstogdill). He's talking about how the real time internet is addicting, and that's not necessarily a good thing.

I swear I'm not a Luddite. I'm not moving to Florida to bitch about the government full time and I'm not in some remote shack banging this out on an ancient Underwood. However, I guess I count myself among the skeptics when it comes to the unmitigated goodness of progress. Or at least its distant cousin, trendiness.

The article rambles a little (intentionally, I think) but has lots of beautifully crafted paragraphs. Like this one:

This all began with these lingering questions: "Why are we conference attendees paying good money, traveling long distances, and sitting for hours in chairs narrower than our shoulders only to stare at our laptops? Why do we go to all that trouble and then spend the time Twittering and wall posting on the overwhelmed conference wifi? Or, more specifically, why are we so fascinated with our own 140 character banalities pouring down the stage curtain that we ignore, or worse, mob up on, the speakers that drew us there in the first place?"

Touché. Even I'm guilty of this one.

Then he talks about what real time addition really is:

Email was the first electronic medium to raise my clock speed, and also my first digital distraction problem. After some "ding, you have mail," I turned off the blackberry notification buzz, added rationing to my kit bag of coping strategies, and kept on concentrating. Then RSS came along and it was like memetic crystal meth. The pursuit of novelty in super-concentrated form delivered like the office coffee service. Plus, no one had to worry about all that behind-the-counter pseudoephedrine run around. "Hey, read as much as you want, no houses were blown up in Indiana to make your brain buzz."

It was a RUSH to know all this stuff, and know it soonest; but it came like a flood. That un-read counter was HARD to keep to zero and there was always one more blog to add. Read one interesting post and be stuck with them forever. In time keeping up with my RSS reader came to be like Lucy in the chocolate factory with the conveyor belt streaming by. From my vantage point today, RSS seems quaint. The good old days. I gave it up for good last year when I finally bought an iPhone and tapped Twitter straight into the vein. Yeah, I went real time.

Now I can get a hit at every stop light. Between previews at the movies. Waiting for the next course at a restaurant. While you are talking to me on a conference call (it's your fault, be interesting). When you look down at dinner to check yours. Last thing before I go to sleep. The moment I wake up. Sitting at a bar. Walking home. While opening presents on Christmas morning (don't judge me, you did it too). In between the sentences of this paragraph.

Don't  tell me you don't see yourself in those paragraphs! And did you think about why you do all this? Here's why:

I tweet into the void and listen for echoes. There it is now, that sweet sweet tweet of instant 140 char affirmation. Feels good. RT means validation. I think I'm developing a Pavlovian response to the @ symbol that borders on the sexual.

Read the whole article for a very interesting second half where he discusses real-time and the singularity.

Posted via email from Navin’s posterous