English and Hindi

Abstract

This study provides a fragment of a contrastive analysis of written texts from Hindi and English. Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language used in South Asia in several varieties by approximately three hundred million people. It is one of the four major world language in terms of number of speakers. In this study, I present a number of sample texts from Hindi, both of the narrative and the expository kind, and discuss them in the theoretical frameworks of contemporary discourse analysis.

Twenty-Five Years of Contrastive Rhetoric: Text Analysis and Writing Pedagogies

“…Clearly, depending on whether the contrastive rhetoric researcher fell upon one or the other of these two common text types, the research conclusions would be quite different. In examining Hindi writing, Kachru (1984) also finds both Hindi style and English style texts, a situation stemming from India's colonial history. Similarly, Clyne (1984) makes the point that German writing on math and engineering resembles English style but that writing on chemistry looks more German, characterized by a greater freedom to bring in broader issues not directly related to the discussion at hand.…”

“…Although schools are clearly the dominant influence on student writing, according to some investigators, few young people in other cultures are explicitly taught how to write in school. Kachru (1984), Eggington (1987) and Hinds (1987) note that in India, Korea, and Japan, respectively, there is little or no direct instruction in writing in the L1. Hinds (1987) reports that Japanese children study writing only to the sixth grade.…”

“…Further broadening the examination of the context in which L1 writing takes place, some researchers have looked at a country's economic, social, and political history in an attempt to explain text development. Kachru (1984Kachru ( , 1988, writing about Hindi, points out that while oral exposition was common in Sanskrit and has influenced Hindi, Hindi expository writing did not really exist before British colonization and therefore can be expected to show the influences both of oral Sanskrit exposition and written British exposition. Matalene (1985) cites Oliver's discussion (1971) of the historical political function of rhetoric in ancient China, one quite different from the rhetorical tradition in the West.…”

Academic Writing and Culture: An Overview of Differences between English, French and German

“…Two opposing positions have emerged, one stressing the universality of academic discourse (Widdowson 1979, Schwanzer 1981, the other postulating the culture-specificity of cognitive and textual structures (e.g. Kaplan 1966, Clyne 1981, 1987, Galtung 1985, House 1997, Kachru 1983. I take issue with the first position here, thus favouring the second.…”

Homogene und heterogene Strömungen: Eindrücke aus dem fernen Süden von der deutschen Sprache und dem neuen Europa

“…Bei Chinesen, Japanern und Indern lassen sich ebenfalls stärkere Unterschiede zwischen der wissenschaftlichen und Alltagssprache erkennen als im Englischen. Auch Untersuchungen der Texte von Koreanern, Japanern und Indern zeigen, daß für sie lineare Diskursstruktur keine Norm ist (Hinds 1980;Eggington 1988;Kachru 1983).…”