English-to-Hamari Boli Wiktionary v1.0[]
Roman Hindi-Urdu is already in vogue and the newer generations are all comfortable using it on web, IMs and SMS -Indians & Pakistanis send over 100Million SMSs daily in Roman-. However, the problem is that there's no standardization and for any standard to be widely agreed upon, there needs to be significant content in it. What better than a Dictionary? An ideal match for the obvious reason that it has the most popular appeal. There are over 150Million internet users in the region (and 50Million+ diaspora) and Google Trends reports 5Million+ 'Dictionary' related searches each month from Indo-Pak! The numbers are only expected to grow in foreseeable future. Who wouldn't just love quality, free dictionaries :)
Therefore, our first undertaking is the Hamari Boli Dictionaries Project, idea is to compile open-source Hamari Boli Dictionaries on this wiki (Eng-to-HB, HB-to-Eng, HB-to-HB, HB-to-Major World Languages, HB-to-Major Regional Languages) and publish in collaboration with Wikimedia Foundation at hb.Wiktionary.org! Having words and meanings of words from both modern Hindi and Urdu in roman script, readers of Devanagari, Perso-Arabic and Roman scripts will all benefit equally.
For example, the entry for "Knowledge" will be;
- Knowledge
- = Ilm
- = Daanish
- = Idraak
- = Vidyaa
- = Gyaan
- Knowledge
As above, the full range of Hindi-Urdu is being brought together. All English words have all meanings in Hindi and Urdu. By using the Roman alphabet, it will be accessible to both Nastaliq and Devanagari readers alike and will also be an invaluable resource for new learners of Hamari Boli (Hindi-Urdu).
Version 1: Starting out with 30k+ words compiled by Mr.Waseem Siddiqui, to be transcribed as per Aazad Scheme. We intend to seed version 1.0 with 100k words. Depending on community interest and contribution, the dictionary will keep on expanding like Wikitionary (English Wikitionary at en.wikitionary.org now boasts 2 million plus entries!). New features such as mobile packs, human pronunciation, etymologies, part of speech, synonyms, antonyms, specialized dictionaries etc and support for regional Desi languages and other major world languages will be added in later versions.