Names and titles in Devanagari

[Christiane]

I've tried to find an exixting thread for this but couldn't, so here goes:


I'm trying to learn Hindi and am slowly making some progress - but I would like to be better at linking names, titles and even songs to devanagari characters. I think in letters, so if I could 'think in Devanagari' instead of in latin letters that would be great help to me. Am I making any sense?

So what I'm looking for is a list of Bollywood names etc. in Devanagari. I try making my own, but I'm afraid I'll make mistakes and mess it up completely! For example, when I saw 'Hrithik' in Devanagari print there were characters that I could even find in my text books! Is that a special case?

[veracious]

Wikipedia (English version) has Devganari of most popular actors... Hindi speakers can confirm or correct the following

Hrithik Roshan: ऋतिक रोशन

Kajol Devgan: काजोल देवगन

Shahrukh Khan: शाहर�ख़ ख़ान

Juhi Chawla: जूही चावला

Aamir Khan: आमिर ख़ान

Amitabh Bachchan: अमिताभ बच�चन

Rani's name I could only find in Bengali: রাণী ম�খার�জী

Salman Khan: सलमान ख़ान

Preity Zinta: प�रीति ज़िंटा


Those are some I could find on Wikipedia.. A lot of movie titles in Devganari are also mentioned in the Wikipedia articles for them. Example, Dil To Pagal Hai. Of course it has to be said that these are not always necessarily correct as anyone can edit Wikipedia articles.

The Devganari titles are always shown in the opening credits so when watching DVD's, you can pause on the screen and see how the title is *actually* written. Sometimes the spellings on the title can be extremely misleading and Anglicized.

[MrB]

Aishwarya Rai: �श�वर�या राय and, irresistably, Telugu: �ಶ�ವರ�ಯ ರೈ

[Charlie]

I recently noted down a whole list of names from a Hindi site but I don't know if they're correct.  I'll list all of them except where it's the same as already posted so that we can work out what's right and what's not:

रानी म�खेर�जी - Rani Mukherjee

सोहा अली ख़ान - Soha Ali Khan

शाहिद कपूर - Shahid Kapur

Aamir, Salman and Shahrukh's same as what Veracious posted

बिपाशा बसू - Bipasha Basu

अक�षय खन�ना - Akshay Khanna

त�षार कपूर - Tusaar Kapur (can't remember how it's usually spelt in English)

रिया सेन - Riya Sen

मनोज बाजपेयी - Manoj Bajpai

अन�पम खेर - Anupam Kher

संजय लीला भंसाली - Sanjay Leela Bhansali

आमिताभ बच�चन - Amitabh Bachchan (site listed an extra अ)

प�रियंका चोपड़ा - Priyanka Chopra

�शा देओल - Esha Deol

[Charlie]

सनी देओल - Sunny Deol (doesn't look right to me though)

अमीषा पटेल - Amisha Patel

लारा दट�टा - Lara Dutta

सैफ़ अली ख़ान - Saif Ali Khan

तन�श�री दट�टा - Tanushree Dutta

समीरा रेड�डी - Sameera Reddy

नेहा धूपिया - Neha Dhupia

अक�षय क�मार - Akshay Kumar

दीया मिर�ज़ा - Dia Mirza

सेलिना जेटली - Celina Jaitley

करीना कपूर - Kareena Kapoor

महिमा चौधरी - Mahima Chaudhary

पेरिज़ाद ज़ोरीबयन - Perizaad Zoribaan

अभिषेक बच�चन - Abhishek Bachchan

ज़ा�द ख़न - Zayed Khan (could be ज़येद instead though)

राह�ल बोस - Rahul Bose

स�नेहा उल�लाल - Sneha Ullal

जॉन अब�राहम - John Abraham

बॉबी देओल - Bobby Deol

कैट�रीना कैफ़ - Katrina Kaif

अर�ज�न रामपाल - Arjun Rampal

उदय चोपड़ा - Uday Chopra

तनीषा म�खेर�जी - Tanisha Mukherjee

संजय दत�त - Sanjay Dutt

अमृता अरोड़ा - Amrita Arora

अमृता राव - Amrita Rao

शिल�पा शेट�टी - Shilpa Shetty

अमरीश प�री - Amrish Puri

डिनो मोरिया - Dino (can't remember)

रिषिता भट�ट - Hrishita Bhatt

शामिता शेट�टी - Shamita Shetty

इमरान हाशमी - Emraan Hashmi

रितेश देशम�ख - Ritesh Deshmukh

उदिता गोस�वामी - Udita Goswami

तब�बू - Tabu

विवेक ओबेरॉय - Vivek Oberoi

भूमिका चावला - Bhumika Chawla

आनिल कपूर - Anil Kapoor

[palacerani]

Dutta has the soft T sound like this:

दत�ता

Tabu - तब�

Hrishita - ह�रिशिता

[Specsy]

I thought Khan was spelled ख़ा� not ख़ान. Or does it not matter?

[bollyscot]

I thought Khan was spelled ख़ा� not ख़ान. Or does it not matter?

I await a native speaker's judgement on that.  My Hindi teachers have told met that it can certainly be pronounced that way.

One thing that suprised me, is the number of cases where a nasalised vowel is realised by native speakers as an oral vowel + nasal:

not  à¤� but ान

I have been unable to ascertain whether the nasal segment has transferred totally from the vowel in this case, so that the sequence is a purely oral vowel (a) followed by the nasal stop (n), or if there is residual nasality in the vowel.

Not ans answer to your question, I'm afraid, but an interesting related point.

Thank you for posting the names.  I always used to wonder, for example, if Aishwarya began with an a + i sequence or the "ai" as in "hai".

[bollyscot]

The above posts, repeated in a larger font size, for those like me who find the normal size too small to read easily!



Hrithik Roshan: ऋतिक रोशन

Kajol Devgan: काजोल देवगन

Shahrukh Khan: शाहर�ख़ ख़ान

Juhi Chawla: जूही चावला

Aamir Khan: आमिर ख़ान

Amitabh Bachchan: अमिताभ बच�चन

Rani's name I could only find in Bengali: রাণী ম�খার�জী

Salman Khan: सलमान ख़ान

Preity Zinta: प�रीति ज़िंटा

Aishwarya Rai: �श�वर�या राय and, irresistably, Telugu: �ಶ�ವರ�ಯ ರೈ

रानी म�खेर�जी - Rani Mukherjee

सोहा अली ख़ान - Soha Ali Khan

शाहिद कपूर - Shahid Kapur

बिपाशा बसू - Bipasha Basu

अक�षय खन�ना - Akshay Khanna

त�षार कपूर - Tusaar Kapur

रिया सेन - Riya Sen

मनोज बाजपेयी - Manoj Bajpai

अन�पम खेर - Anupam Kher

संजय लीला भंसाली - Sanjay Leela Bhansali

आमिताभ बच�चन - Amitabh Bachchan (site listed an extra अ)

प�रियंका चोपड़ा - Priyanka Chopra

�शा देओल - Esha Deol

सनी देओल - Sunny Deol

अमीषा पटेल - Amisha Patel

लारा दट�टा - Lara Dutta

सैफ़ अली ख़ान - Saif Ali Khan

तन�श�री दट�टा - Tanushree Dutta

समीरा रेड�डी - Sameera Reddy

नेहा धूपिया - Neha Dhupia

अक�षय क�मार - Akshay Kumar

दीया मिर�ज़ा - Dia Mirza

सेलिना जेटली - Celina Jaitley

करीना कपूर - Kareena Kapoor

महिमा चौधरी - Mahima Chaudhary

पेरिज़ाद ज़ोरीबयन - Perizaad Zoribayan

अभिषेक बच�चन - Abhishek Bachchan

ज़ा�द ख़न - Zayed Khan (could be ज़येद instead though)

राह�ल बोस - Rahul Bose

स�नेहा उल�लाल - Sneha Ullal

जॉन अब�राहम - John Abraham

बॉबी देओल - Bobby Deol

कैट�रीना कैफ़ - Katrina Kaif

अर�ज�न रामपाल - Arjun Rampal

उदय चोपड़ा - Uday Chopra

तनीषा म�खेर�जी - Tanisha Mukherjee

संजय दत�त - Sanjay Dutt

अमृता अरोड़ा - Amrita Arora

अमृता राव - Amrita Rao

शिल�पा शेट�टी - Shilpa Shetty

अमरीश प�री - Amrish Puri

डिनो मोरिया - Dino Morea

रिषिता भट�ट - Hrishita Bhatt

शामिता शेट�टी - Shamita Shetty

इमरान हाशमी - Emraan Hashmi

रितेश देशम�ख - Ritesh Deshmukh

उदिता गोस�वामी - Udita Goswami

विवेक ओबेरॉय - Vivek Oberoi

भूमिका चावला - Bhumika Chawla

आनिल कपूर - Anil Kapoor

दत�ता - Dutta

Tabu - तब�

Hrishita - ह�रिशिता

[Christiane]

Thank you so much everybody. This is just what I was looking for..

I have an additional question:

By now we've seen ऋ, ह�रि, and even simply रि equalling Hr(i). Why is that? I realise the problem probably lies with the Latin transliteration, but it's still curious. Are they pronounced differently in Hindi? Especially the first sign confuses me.

(I'm only interested the consonant, but I don't seem to be able to delete the vocal from the last two examples)

[MrB]

The BBC Hindi website's entertainment page is a useful source of star names. They currently have articles in Devanagari script about the Dhoom 2 stars, Karisma Kapoor, Aish and Abhishek, Amitabh, Sanjay Dutt (see if you can spot the Devanagari for "not a terrorist") and others. I enjoy reading these as Hindi practice, as they are about interesting people and you usually know roughly what the story is about from reading English language articles, so that gives a head start in understanding the Hindi version.

On the question of  रि, ऋ, हà¥�रि - I have asked a very patient Hindi speaker, who says there is a difference in pronunciation: they have increasing amount of "h" sound at the beginning, ranging from none at all to substantial. Most words definitely require a particular one of these in their spelling.

[Charlie]

Great, finally I can read that site with conjuncts included.

[moviemeh]

UPDATE: Never mind, I just needed to change the encoding to UTF-8 and it displays perfectly!

This is a very interesting thread, and by the way I am learning Hindi these days (I haven't posted in a while) but I am not picking it up as Devanagari, is it like non-Unicode or something? How do I make it display correctly? On every other site I've seen, it just works, with Windows/Firefox automatically changing it to Mangal or whatever I choose in the browser settings.

I'm getting this:

[latishya]

UPDATE: Never mind, I just needed to change the encoding to UTF-8 and it displays perfectly!

This is a very interesting thread, and by the way I am learning Hindi these days (I haven't posted in a while) but I am not picking it up as Devanagari, is it like non-Unicode or something? How do I make it display correctly? On every other site I've seen, it just works, with Windows/Firefox automatically changing it to Mangal or whatever I choose in the browser settings.

I'm getting this:

Interesting - that hasn't worked for me in Chrome, or in Firefox - still seeing that garbled mess, even with UTF-8 selected, also in the source for the page when I press Ctrl+U

[moviemeh]

Interesting - that hasn't worked for me in Chrome, or in Firefox - still seeing that garbled mess, even with UTF-8 selected, also in the source for the page when I press Ctrl+U

Weird. Same setting View > Character Encoding while on the page itself? By the way the setting doesn't seem to stick, I have to do it again every time I load the page. There's probably a workaround for that.

Are you using Windows, and if so what version?

[latishya]

Weird. Same setting View > Character Encoding while on the page itself? By the way the setting doesn't seem to stick, I have to do it again every time I load the page. There's probably a workaround for that.

Are you using Windows, and if so what version?

Thanks. I had changed the default settings in my browsers, but the page's own settings were overriding it, as you said. Changing them did the trick. Much obliged

[moviemeh]

I found a workaround in Firefox called Charset Switcher, you can set the encoding for http://www.bollywhat-forum.com to UTF-8 and it will remember it.

[moviemeh]

From the BBC Hindi Entertainment/Bollywood section MrB linked to, great resource, thanks!

Naseeruddin Shah नसीरुद्दीन शाह 
Vidya Balan विद्या बालन

I'm sure there are others, but it is a bit late.

[moviemeh]

Note two spellings of Dutta (as in Lara, Divya, Tanushree) have been presented. Just from doing searches, I can tell palacerani is right.

"लारा दत्ता" (Lara Dutta)brings up 55 results in BBC Hindi
"लारा दट्टा" brings up 0 results in BBC Hindi
"लारा दट्टा" brings up only one result in Google, this thread

Similar results were found searching for the other Duttas. To summarize:

Divya Dutta (new for this list) दिव्या दत्ता
Lara Dutta लारा दत्ता
Tanushree Dutta तनुश्री दत्ता