Marathi

About: Marathi is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 629 publications have been published within this topic receiving 3863 citations.

Baby Talk in Six Languages

Abstract: O CCASIONALLY linguists have turned their attention to the description of marginal systems within languages, such as animal calls, hesitation forms, or baby talk. Such phenomena have sometimes been studied because of purely linguistic interest in synchronic description: they often have elements of sound or form which do not occur in the "normal" central system of the language or have unusual arrangements or frequencies of occurrence of elements which do occur in the central system. This kind of study is of particular relevance to the question of the monosystemic nature of languages versus polytypical analyses of "coexistent" systems. These marginal phenomena have also sometimes been studied from a psychological point of view, in relation to questions of language acquisition or language function. The present paper approaches the analysis of baby talk from a rather general taxonomic, linguistic interest. The intention is to initiate cross-language studies of marginal phenomena of this kind which will lead to a general characterization of them and to a framework for the characterization of single-language marginal phenomena in such a way that synchronic classification and historical explanation become possible. By the term baby talk is meant here any special form of a language which is regarded by a speech community as being primarily appropriate for talking to young children and which is generally regarded as not the normal adult use of language. English examples would include choo-choo for adult train, or ittybitty for little. In most cases the baby-talk item can also be used in some other situation with special value; in some cases (e.g., peek-a-boo) the item has no counterpart in normal language since it refers to an activity or object appropriate chiefly for children. The method used here will be the comparison of baby-talk phenomena in six languages, selected for variety of linguistic structure and sociolinguistic setting within the limits of available material: (Syrian) Arabic, Marathi, Comanche, Gilyak, (American) English, Spanish. The first two are major languages of Asia with millions of speakers and strong literary traditions; the second two are of small nonliterate communities, one New World, one Old World; the last two are major European languages. The primary source materials for the first four languages are the articles of Ferguson (1956), Kelkar (1964), Casagrande (1948), and Austerlitz (1956); the material on English and Spanish was compiled from informants for this study."

Three partial null-subject languages: a comparison of Brazilian Portuguese, Finnish, and Marathi

Abstract: . The paper discusses properties characteristic of partial null-subject languages, that is languages which allow null subjects but under more restricted conditions than consistent null-subject languages. Three such languages are compared: Brazilian Portuguese, Finnish, and Marathi. It is demonstrated that they have indefinite null subjects, in particular, a null counterpart of English generic one, but allow definite 3rd person null subjects only when controlled from a higher clause, while consistent null-subject languages do not allow null ‘one’, but do allow definite 3rd person null subjects without a controlling antecedent. A theory is proposed to explain this difference between the two types, with elements from Holmberg (2005), Frascarelli (2007), and Roberts (2007). The structural difference is that consistent null-subject languages have an unvalued D-feature in T which is absent from partial null-subject languages. The relation between a null subject embedded in a finite clause and its controller is discussed in some detail. There is some degree of variation between the three languages, yet the relation in all three of them is different from obligatory control and from non-obligatory control, as familiar from non-finite clauses, and also different from the antecedence relation found in consistent null-subject languages.

Recognition of unconstrained online Devanagari characters

Abstract: Devanagari is a script used for several major languages such as Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi and Nepali, and is used by more than 500 million people. Unconstrained Devanagari writing is more complex than English cursive due to the possible variations in the order, number, directional and shape of the constituent strokes. An online pen computing environment has numerous application in providing an easy human interface for a complex script like Devanagari. A Devanagari character recognition experiment with 20 different writers with each writer writing 5 samples of each character in a totally unconstrained way, has been conducted. An accuracy of 86.5% with no rejects is achieved through the combination of multiple classifiers that focus on either local online properties, or global off-line properties. Further improvements in performance are expected by using word-level contextual information. We also explore the use of writer dependent models to improve the recognition accuracy.

Same-sex love in India : readings from literature and history

Abstract: PART I: INTRODUCTION: ANCIENT INDIAN MATERIALS Vyasa's Mahabharata : Sikhandin's Sex Change (Sanskrit) Manikantha Jataka (Pali) Vishnu Sharma's Panchatantra (Sanskrit) Vatsyayana's Kamasutra (Sanskrit) PART II: INTRODUCTION: MEDIEVAL MATERIALS IN THE SANSKRATIC TRADITION Bhagvata Purana : The Embrace of Shiva and Vishnu (Sanskrit) Skanda Purana : Sumedha and Somavan (Sanskrit) Shiva Purana : The Birth of Kartikeya (Sanskrit) Shiva Purana : The Birth of Ganesha (Sanskrit) Somadeva Bhatta's Kathasaritsagara : Kalingasena and Somaprabha (Sanskrit) Padma Purana : Arjuni (Sanskrit) Ayyappa and Vavar: Celibate Friends Krittivasa Ramayana : The Birth of Bhagiratha (Bengali) Jagannath Das (Oriya) PART III: INTRODUCTION: MEDIEVAL MATERIALS IN THE PERSO-URDU TRADITION Amir Khusro (Persian and Hindvi) Ziauddin Barani: The Khaljis in Love (Persian) The Mirror of Secrets : 'Akhi' Jamshed Rajgiri (Persian) Baburnama (Turkish) 'Mutribi' Samarqandi: The Fair and the Dark Boys (Persian) Haqiqat al-Fuqara : Poetic Biography of "Madho Lal" Hussayn (Persian), with Hussayn's poems (Punjabi) Sarmad (Persian) Muhammad Akram 'Ghanimat' Kanjohi: Love's Sorcery (Persian) 'Abru': Advice to a Beloved (Urdu) Siraj Aurangabadi: The Garden of Delusion (Urdu) Mir Abdul Hai'Taban': The Lover Who Looked like a Beloved (Urdu) Dargah Quli Khan: Portrait of a City (Persian) Mir Taqi 'Mir': Autobiography and Poems (Persian and Urdu) PART IV: INTRODUCTION: MODERN INDIAN MATERIALS Nazir Akbaraadi (Urdu) Rekhti Poetry: Love Between Women (Urdu) Shri Ramakrishna Paramahansa (Bengali) Bankim Chandra Chatterjee: Indira (Bengali) The Kamasutra in the Twentieth Century Gopabandhu Das: Poems Written in Prison (Oriya) The New Homophobia: Ugra's Chocolate (Hindi) M. K. Gandhi: Reply to a Query (English) Amrita Sher-Gil: Letters (English) Hakim Muhammad Yusuf Hasan: Do Shiza (Urdu) 'Firaq' Gorakhpuri: Poet vs. 'Critic' (Urdu) Sharada: 'Farewell' (Hindi) Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala': Kulli Bhaat (Hindi) Josh Malihabadi: 'There Will Never Be Another Like You' (Urdu) Ismat Chughatai: 'Tehri Lakeer' (Urdu) Rajendra Yadav: 'Waiting' (Hindi) Bhupen Khakhar: A Story (Gujarati) Kishori Charan Das: 'Sarama's Romjance' (Oriya) Kewal Sood: The Hen Coop (Hindi) Shobhana Siddique: 'Full to the Brim' (Hindi) V.T. Nandakumar: Two Girls (Malayalam) Vijay Dan Detha: 'A Double Life' (Jajasthani) Vikram Seth: Poems (English) Nirmala Deshpande: 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' (Marathi) Vijay Tendulkar: Mitra's Story (Marathi) Sunil Gangopadhyay: Those Days (Bengali) H.S. Shivaprakash: Shakespeare Dreamship (Kannada) Inez Vere Dullas: Poems (English) Hoshang Merchant: Poems for Vivan (English) Ambia: 'One Person and Another' (Tamil)

Cross-Lingual Sentiment Analysis for Indian Languages using Linked WordNets

Abstract: Cross-Lingual Sentiment Analysis (CLSA) is the task of predicting the polarity of the opinion expressed in a text in a language Ltest using a classifier trained on the corpus of another language Lt rain. Popular approaches use Machine Translation (MT) to convert the test document in Ltest to Lt rain and use the classifier of Lt rain. However, MT systems do not exist for most pairs of languages and even if they do, their translation accuracy is low. So we present an alternative approach to CLSA using WordNet senses as features for supervised sentiment classification. A document in Ltest is tested for polarity through a classifier trained on sense marked and polarity labeled corpora of Lt rain. The crux of the idea is to use the linked WordNets of two languages to bridge the language gap. We report our results on two widely spoken Indian languages, Hindi (450 million speakers) and Marathi (72 million speakers), which do not have an MT system between them. The sense-based approach gives a CLSA accuracy of 72% and 84% for Hindi and Marathi sentiment classification respectively. This is an improvement of 14%-15% over an approach that uses a bilingual dictionary.