Bhashegalu: Hindi-Kannada

Har bhaasha ek pul hai. Prati bhaasheyoo ondu setuve. Every language is a bridge. Hindi is Indo-Aryan. Kannada is Dravidian. They are unrelated, yet Hindi speakers learning Kannada keep meeting familiar words. Bhashegalu maps that traffic: which words crossed, and which resemblances are accidents. 5,000 PAIRS, ON YOUR DEVICE Each pair has Hindi and Kannada scripts, romanizations, origins and noun genders, plus a plain statement of how the words relate. 3,332 pairs say the same thing in entirely different words. 1,667 genuinely share a word or a source: 855 through Sanskrit, 635 through English, 128 through Persian and Arabic, 13 through older Dravidian, 6 through Portuguese, 30 unsettled. That is 4,999 pairs, and one word standing alone: ಚಂಡೆ chande, a coastal Karnataka drum Hindi has no word for, because the drum does not travel. Search either language in either script, offline. MONTHS, DIRECTIONS, AND KARNATAKA ITSELF All twelve month names, the four compass directions, gold, sixty and eighty. Malenaadu the hill country, bayaluseeme the plains, karaavali the coast. The Bengaluru address that is a Cross, a Main and a Layout, plus taluk, hobli and panchayat. Where a word travels further, the entry names where: Urdu, Telugu, Marathi, Tulu, nineteen more. ASK ABOUT ANY WORD The 5,000 are the curated core, not the ceiling. Type a word the list lacks and Bhashegalu builds the same entry for it: both scripts, both origins, and whether the two sides connect. These answers are AI-generated, labeled on screen, each with a control to flag anything wrong. YOUR OWN TUTOR Write Hindi or Kannada in Roman letters and a patient tutor corrects the sentence, explains the fix in plain English, translates, and answers you, in Roman, Kannada or Devanagari. It asks consent first; conversations stay on your device. WHAT THAT SONG IS ACTUALLY SAYING Type a Hindi or Kannada song and get its language taken apart: where the words come from, what the poetry is doing, and the film, composer and lyricist where known. Original commentary only; lyrics never reproduced. HONEST ABOUT WHAT IS NOT KNOWN A wrong etymology is worse than an honest “scholars disagree,” so an unsettled origin is labeled unsettled. Harder is refusing a pattern that is not there: maa and amma look like proof of contact, but nursery words for mother resemble one another everywhere. GENDER AND THE TWO SCRIPTS Hindi assigns gender by convention; Kannada assigns it by meaning, and 3,698 entries carry both systems. Devanagari and the Kannada script are both grandchildren of Brahmi, so they line up row for row: the chart sets 58 letter rows against each other, adds the 14 vowel signs and 9 ottu conjuncts, and marks where correspondence breaks. 53 rows have a Devanagari letter, 51 a Kannada one, only 46 both. Three practice modes. A WORD A DAY, FIVE ESSAYS, A QUIZ One word from the list each morning, with an optional 9 a.m. notification. Five essays on how two unrelated languages came to share so much: the Sanskrit layer Kannada’s own grammarians named in the thirteenth century, the Deccan Persian courts whose Dakhni is still spoken in North Karnataka, and the sound change that turned p into h. Each reads itself aloud. Plus eight-question quizzes. No account. No ads. No tracking. Pronounce buttons use your device’s Hindi and Kannada voices; the interface runs in English, हिन्दी or ಕನ್ನಡ, light or dark; entries stay in English. The 5,000 pairs, the chart, the practice, the quiz, the daily word and the essays work in airplane mode. Four things need a connection, and only when you ask: a word beyond the 5,000, the tutor, song breakdowns, and reading an essay aloud. Bhashegalu, ಭಾಷೆಗಳು, means “languages.” It is Kannada bhaashe, from Sanskrit bhaasha, which is also the Hindi word: one of the 1,667. The word for bridge is not shared at all: Hindi pul, Kannada setuve. Both facts belong here.