The Odia Project ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା
I've been always fascinated by the linguistic and cultural
diversity of India. When I worked at the University of Tübingen, I coordinated
a German language project for Asian students and also had a lot of Indian
students. There were no two students with the same mother tongue. One student
would speak Kannada, the other Marathi and another one Telugu. Interestingly
the Indian students rather spoke English with each other than Hindi. So,
whenever I meet an Indian, my first question is always "What's your mother
tongue?". That's how I recently heard of the language Odia.
Odia is the official language of the state Odisha, located
on the eastern coast of India. It has around 40 million native speakers and is
one of the six languages, which are awarded classical status in India. The
other five are Tamil, Sanskrit, Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam.
So, when I heard of Odia, I decided to challenge myself to
write a little text in Odia, In my previous post about Amharic, I already
described a bit, how I do this kind of challenge:
https://lingotopia.blogspot.de/2017/04/amharic-challenge.html.
The Keyboard
The Odia alphabet is an abugida, "a segmental writing
system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unit: each unit is
based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida). The Ge'ez script, that is used for
Amharic is an abugida as well.
So, I installed the Odia keyboard on my computer and was
faced with the problem that there is a big number of ligatures. See the entry
on Wikipedia and you'll understand what I'm talking about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odia_alphabet.
The consonants and vowels are all represented on the
keyboard, but not the ligatures and I didn't find any tutorial, explaining, how
to type the ligatures. So, I totally depend on my one Odia native speaker
friend and whenever I don't know, how to type a letter, I send him a quick
message. I'm planning to put together a cheat sheet for that, which I will also
publish here later.
The Resources
As I wrote in my post about Amharic, there are not so many
resources for learning Odia available. So, I also relied on Omniglot and Learn
101 for my writing challenge. There are some lessons on youtube. But many of
them are more directed to children, who are native Odia speakers, and also the
lessons for non-native Odia speakers focus more on vocabulary rather than
grammar. But I'm the kind of language learner type, who really wants to dig
into the grammar (my first foreign language was Latin...) and I have yet to
find something suitable for my learning style. That's why I will try to put
something together myself.
The music
Tuma Pari Chhota Pila Tie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDzXUU21-Uo
This is a very famous Odia children song. Based on a poem by
Dr Jagannath Mohanty about an incident in the early life of Madhusudan Das
(1848-1934), an Odia poet and freedom fighter. You can find the lyrics in Odia
and English translation as well as an explanation of the meaning here:
http://ashishkumarnayakodisha.blogspot.de/2016/04/child-like-you.html.
Odisha Mo Odisha:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyaZps3-Hng
This is a popular and patriotic song about culture and
traditions of Odisha.
Rangabati:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY_rMXXuJp8
This is a popular folk song in Sambalpuri, one of the main
dialects of Odia. This is a modern version sung by the actress Sona Mohapatra.
To learn more about the lyrics and the background of the song as well as listen
to other versions of this song, read the entry on Quora:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-meaning-of-the-Sambalpuri-song-Rangabati.
I practiced the pronunciation of Odia by singing "Tuma
Pari Chhota Pila Tie" and "Odisha Mo Odisha" and in order to get
feedback on my pronunciation, I send the recordings to my friend. I'm not a
good singer, so I feel a bit sorry for that. ;-)
When I was looking for Odia songs, I also found the Odia
version of the song "Jabra Fan". It's the anthem of the 2016 movie
"Fan" with Shah Rukh Khan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_(film).
Original Hindi version by Nakash Aziz:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4_szl5EEww
This is the original Hindi version with English subtitles,
so please watch this first. There's also a synopsis of the movie.
This is a mash-up of 11 different language versions of this
song. The languages are Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Marathi,
Bengali, Gujarati, Arabic, Odia and Sinhala. All language versions are also
available on Youtube separately. Since I am learning Odia and Arabic, I'm
providing the links for those versions:
What's next?
Odia made it into the list of languages, that I want to
learn actively. Since there are not many resources with a systematical approach
available, I'll try to create my own resources with the help of my Odia native
speaker friend with whom I plan to do a German-Odia tandem. My to-do-list:
- create a cheat sheet for the Odia keyboard
- create a systematic overview of the Odia grammar
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