It is exactly 11 PM, 18th of March as I set out to type this assignment. It says, ‘Here, XYZ is your first language. The assignment expects you to write about the features that are currently not there in your language (or maybe in any language).’ Ohh, do I find this to be a tricky one. Well, for starters my first language should be Haryanvi, but I am pretty sure it stopped being used as a means of communication in my family a few generations back. Next up is very probably Hindi, and I know a lot of people are going to be writing on the same language, which only means tougher competition to be graded against. Well, we dread and start out writing about Hindi in English.

That is a good point to ponder about. The language English has about 1.452 billion speakers and Hindi has in total about 602.2 million speakers. There must be some reason for the prevalence of English. Yes, I do agree that the rise of the British Empire and its 57 colonies played a very big role. But, there is a bigger attribute, which is the simplicity of the language. 

Hindi, in its innateness, is based on the Devanagari script and has 33 constants with 13 vowels. These constants need to be combined with a multitude of vowels to make more representative elements of an ideal Hindi word. Whereas, a language of a more widespread nature like English only has 26 alphabets to be taken care of. I am no American coloniser who can force out a language of a region but if I had the chance to, I would definitely try and make Hindi simpler to write. Imagine if Hindi was just like Hebrew having no vowels in written form. At least I would have scored better in my grade 10 Hindi examinations.

I do kind of have grudges with the language, more or less because I always found it hard to write. The language has a complex system of vowel implications also known as ‘matras’ and they are hard to get right even if you speak the language on a daily.

Another feature I wish Hindi had was being a bit more translatable to the southern languages. It is so easy to understand a language such as Punjabi or Haryanvi when knowing Hindi, but it is dead hard to understand any southern language knowing only Hindi. Although I am pretty sure the demand for such a feature in Hindi would decent enough to fill up a page or two, it is inherently not possible to have such a feature as they are languages of different classes. Although, a point to note is the fact that they do have a common predecessor Brahmi. 

The last feature I wish Hindi had was that from the language Warlpiri. I wish we could write words in any order just like we can in Warlpiri. The feature is of no actual use. I just feel like it would be hilarious to have that ability after speaking the language in a construct for so many years.

This is a piece I wrote for my course HSS F222 Linguistics. The problem statement for the assignment is as given here.

Updated: 8th March 1500 hrs

For a maximum of 20 marks, in a maximum of 500 words, write a short note on:

"Features that I wish were in my language: XYZ".

Here, XYZ is your first language. The assignment expects you to write about the features that are currently not there in your language (or maybe in any language). It is not a question about 'what words I wish my language had'. No. It is about the features of languages. Don't simply name/list the features. Say something about them. Be a talker. Express. I don't mind narrative story-telling, conversational, humorous, personal styles of writing. I am not an enemy of formal style of writing either.

Submit as a word document, right here on CMS. Rename the document as "James Bond 2018xxxxxxH.doc", replacing it with the correct name and ID number.

If you are referring to some sources, please give a reference list.

Copy-pasting is plagiarism. Plagiarism guarantees a zero in the assignment and an additional suitable penalty.

LAST DATE: 20th March 2359 hrs. Late submissions are not accepted. Submit well within the time. It is better to submit a shoddily and hastily written assignment within time than to wait until the last moment for a beautiful piece of ingenious writing only to discover you have crossed the deadline.