Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Some Words that Show Up a Lot in Bollywood Songs

Bollywood for the Skeptical: "Hindi has a somewhat complicated grammar, but without trying to teach sentence structure or anything (except to note that prepositions in Hindi are actually postpositions, so "Dil Se" means "From the Heart," not "Heart From"), these words might be useful in understanding the gist of Bollywood songs. Most of them are love songs, which right away makes things easier. If a word ends in "a," it can often also end in "on" (one of those nasal vowels), "i" or "e." Like I said, it's hard to transliterate, and a lot of the spellings below are the common ones rather than the consistent ones ("suraj" sounds like "soo-ruhj," but "sub" sounds like "sub," not "soob"). But anyway, I've listed them by the English alphabetical order of the Hindi words. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but it was a lot of work, so I'm not changing it. Actually, it hasn't been a lot of work yet, because right now, as I'm writing this, I haven't done most of it yet, but I can't think of a better way. "

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