da_hooman_husky@lemmy.world 9 months ago
English (for various reasons) is kinda the only common language throughout India. There isn’t actually one non-English language that you can learn and be understood throughout India, (e.g. if someone from the state of Punjab goes to the state of Tamil Nadu, they likely might need to speak English to understand each other though there are always exceptions to this) so English is very commonly spoken throughout India. As with any English speaking country, the language has changed within India and Southeast Asia over time. Many of the other languages spoken throughout India are more strict in their phonetics, e.g. each syllable has a specific sound and doesn’t change based on the surrounding syllables. Many English speakers who learn in India likely end up using this kind of speech pattern with English as well, leading to a different cadence in pronunciation than in other regions of the world. There are times it sounds faster, but pay attention and see if you can notice if the person speaking is using more syllables or pronouncing parts of the word you might skip over in the same word, but just faster.
Sternhammer@aussie.zone 9 months ago
Re: dickie for car boot (what Americans would call the ‘trunk’); some old two-seater cars had a third seat in the boot, known as a ‘dickie-seat’, at least in the UK, so perhaps it’s an old term that still survives in Indian English.
merc@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
It goes back even further than that.
An 1865 dictionary of American English uses “boot” instead of “trunk” to refer to the… well trunks that were strapped to the front and back of a coach. (A coach being a specific kind of horse-drawn carriage, which takes its name from the village of Kocs in Hungary where they were popular.)
archive.org/details/…/2up
www.etymonline.com/word/coach
In that 1865 dictionary, a Dickey (or Dicky) is defined as “A seat behind a carriage, for servants &c”, and a Rumble as “A boot with a seat above it for servants, behind a carriage.”
archive.org/details/…/2up
So, originally in American English, the trunks strapped to the outside of a carriage were called “boots”, and the seats above them were “rumbles”, and maybe when there was no “boot”, just a seat for servants they were called “dickies”.
In Indian English somehow the “seat on the outside of a carriage” became the “compartment in the back of a vehicle for storing things”. In British English they kept the name “boot” when it changed from an external box to a box that was part of the vehicle itself. And, in American English, they switched to calling it a “trunk”, most likely before it actually became part of the vehicle.