Articles
Two unrelated languages, a thousand years of contact. These are the essays that ship inside the Bhashegalu app, here in full so they are easy to share: which words crossed between Hindi and Kannada, which doorway they came through, and which resemblances only look like kinship.
Unrelated languages, familiar words
Hindi is Indo-Aryan. Kannada is Dravidian. No family tree joins them, and yet a Hindi speaker starting Kannada keeps meeting words they already know. Both facts are true, and this whole project lives in the gap between them.
The grammarian who named the layers
Kannada never descended from Sanskrit, but its formal register is saturated with it, and Kannada’s own grammarians sorted the layers in the thirteenth century. On tatsama, tadbhava, achchagannada, and the vowel that ends almost every borrowed noun.
Persian on Kannada ground
Delhi is the famous half of the Persian story. The other half happened in Kalaburagi, Bidar, and Vijayapura, which is why Kannada settles a bill in kharchu and waits for a javaabu. Also: the vowel that hides a loanword.
Same skeleton, different handwriting
Set the Kannada and Devanagari charts side by side and they match row for row, because both descend from Brahmi. Then look closer: Kannada stacks its clusters downward, and keeps two vowel letters Hindi never needed.
When p became h
Kannada milk is haalu and Tamil milk is paal. That is not a coincidence, it is a regular sound change, and it is the best tool anyone has for telling an inherited Kannada word from a borrowed one, or from an accident.
