What is Hagura?

September 18, 2016

Hagura is a Kannada word for light-weight. The theme is very light and has very little CSS. The theme has very legible font style and distraction free layout.

Now, a little more about Kannada. Kannada is probably the only language where spoken and written forms of a word are same.

English and German: Most of the time in these languages we don’t read the word as a combination of letters probably because they use Latin script. In fact, what we speak is the phonetic transcription of the words. examples: take two similar English words “put (/pʊt/)” and “cut (/kʌt/)” the ‘u’ in “put” is spoken with ‘ʊ’ sound but in “cut” it is having ‘ʌ’ sound. Similarly the German ‘G’ in “Tag” is pronounced like English ‘K’ but the same German ‘G’ in “Gut” is pronounced like English ‘G’ itself.

So it’s plain that in European languages (at least in English and German and probably in French, Italian and Spanish also) the written and spoken forms of words are quite different. Further there are more strange practices especially in English, like using silent letters(doubt), epiglottis stop for repeated letters (bottle), not pronouncing ending letters (come, going, trying) and some really strange words (programme, analogue, queue) etc.

Now the question is whether there is a language where spoken and written forms of a word are same? The answer is yes, there is a language called Kannada where a word is written and spoken in exactly same way. You can just pick up the letters that you want and put them together to form a word, it may not have meaning but it will be pronounced as if you are reading the letters together. I don’t want to call it as a superiority aspect of this language and take pride in this language being my mother tongue but I would say that it is something unique of this language.

Source: prismoflife