On a side note, I have an HTTP200 license plate and I want to get some nice Indian truck style lettering saying HORN <HTTP200> PLEASE around it :)
What the heck does "HORN OK PLEASE" mean anyway? I had seen it my whole childhood.
OK was originally a separate thing that used to occur in locations other than between the two words. I distinctly recall this from my childhood. Don't know the origins of it but there is some suggestion on the internet that it was copied from Tata trucks which had the logo of the OK soap (a lotus).
They could occur in the current order, but it was not necessary. It should still be read as separate from the "horn please" phrase.
As the country became functionally more illiterate over the years (yes, probably a controversial opinion :) ), the three words were just rote copied inline and painted on trucks, with the meaning lost to time.
I was told that this was the polite honk triplet - the two honk call and one honk response.
"honk honk" / "honk"
"horn ok" / "please"
My personal theory is that this is because you can make every sound you hear in English using the Devnagari script, but not the other way around.
As a Britisher learner it's frustrating actually, because there is a standard for how to do this - IAST, for Sanskrit/derived generally - but of course that's not what native speakers use casually. E.g. your 'angrezi se hindi' would be 'añgrezī se hiñdī' but anyone writing Hindi with those accents is foreign or an academic. (Also people will casually write 'ay' instead of 'e' ए or 'ee' for 'ī' ई, etc. cf. 'paneer'.)
This is not very close to true. English (even a given accent) has a rather high number of phonemes. What is probably more relevant here is that Devanagari is relatively phonetic so writing in it is useful to describe English pronunciations, more so than the English script is for Hindi (or English, for most unfamiliar words).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...
lelandfe•4h ago
Love the over the top Amrit D.J. Band ones; they remind me of old school Barnum & Bailey signs.