Iss ko kya hogaya hai?

Our tongues are better suited to any character.

We can speak nearly anything phonetically.

/r/badlinguistics

That's not how it works. You can articulate what you are trained to hear and if you haven't been trained to hear that sound, you don't hear it. It's not that Hindi-speaking tongues are better suited to any character.

For example, a Hindi-speaker doesn't have the equivalent of the Dutch 'ij' sound in their alphabet. We simply don't hear that sound till we are trained to. We hear the closest approximation ('ai').

Or closer home, most Malayalees and Tamilians are probably aware of how native Hindi-speakers seemingly struggle with the 'zh' sound.

Look at an American say Pani Puri and you hear Panny Pouri...

Yes, another reason for this is because they're reading the English transliteration and not Hindi. 'Pani Puri' in General American I'm guessing (I'm not an American) would be Panny Pure-i / Purr-i.

Hindi speakers do this too. How do most Hindi-speakers pronounce the word 'thought'? The 'th' is pronounced as थ and not as the θ sound of standard English accents such as Received Pronunciation or General American.

/r/BollyBlindsNGossip Thread Parent Link - i.redd.it