Recently I had written about the difficulties I faced while chatting with Shilpa in Kannada. Today I figured out one more difficulty that could crop up, but thankfully didn’t during my last chat with her.
One peculiarity with Kannada (i guess it must exist with more Indian languages) is that written Kannada is completely different from spoken Kannada. In fact, the only people who SPEAK written Kannada are maadus settled in Bangalore.
Now, when you chat using Roman script, which form of Kannada do you use? I didn’t face that problem with Shilpa because neither of us know written Kannada too well (I remember the nightmares I have reading the Vijaya Karnataka when my dad asks me to read what he thinks are interesting articles; I take one minute per sentence). But what if I were talking with someone who has formally studied Kannada?
A couple of years back, when my cousin-in-law was abroad, he used to mail me. All his mails used to be in written Kannada written in the Roman script. Used to be so heavy I would just reply in English.
Wondering if we can start a “kannada in roman script association” where we can come up with soem kind of standardization!