Look out Maharashtra, the Marathi LIP is now available!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/04/26 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/04/26/10001994.aspx

Yes, that is right, available for the English version of Windows 7 is the Language Interface Pack for Marathi! :-)

You can download it right here (32-bit only).

And for a bit about the language (not done previously for the Vista version):

NUMBER OF SPEAKERS: 70 million native speakers, plus about 20 million second language speakers

NAME IN THE LANGUAGE ISELF: मराठी

Marathi is mainly spoken in the Indian state of Maharashtra, where it is official language, and to a lesser extent in the neighboring states. In fact, Maharashtra was formed in 1960 when the former Bombay state was split up into the linguistic areas of Marathi and Gujarati. Marathi is one of the official languages of India. Also known as Maharashtri, Maharathi, Malhatee or Marthi, the language derives its grammar and syntax from Sanskrit and is therefore one of the Indo-Aryan languages. With its about 90 million speakers it is comparable in rank with languages like Korean or Vietnamese.

CLASSIFICATION: Marathi is the southernmost of the Indo-Aryan languages (which include Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi) which in turn belong to the big Indo-European language family. Its closest relative is Konkani.

SCRIPT: Marathi is written in Devanagari (like Hindi, for example).

You can look to Wikipedia for more info on Marathi, right here. In fact, if it makes sense someone might even link to the LIP from there? :-)

Some other factoids, Michael Kaplan style, right here:

• Marathi is one of the distinguished languages on the list of Windows locales whose ISO-639 code (mr) does not match its Windows 3-Letter Language Code minus the third letter (MAR --> MA), as described in LOCALE_SABBREVLANGNAME is so not an ISO-639 code. It is for this reason that the Language Bar abbreviation is MA and not MR:
  
  
  
  
• As early as 2002, the information in the following slide was included in IUC presentations done by Cathy or me or both of us:
  
  
  
  But even though we both cited this difference, it was not captured in the Windows collation tables until Vista (in all prior versions the Indic tables were always combined and only Hindi amnong the Devanagari script languages was given its unique sort. As far as I know, Konkani still not captured separately, but this example we had been citing for years seemed important to do, at least. :-)
  
  
• In response to Learning to spell in Bengali (when one has a cool input method), Suraj commented:
  
     Google also provides a similar tool (http://www.google.com/ime/transliteration/) which I found to be better for Marathi input. Perhaps you should have a look?
  
  But I lack the language knowledge to compare the two input methods for Marathi - I will leave that for others to judge....

Enjoy!

Pavanaja U B on 28 Apr 2010 9:19 PM:

Kiran Kumar Chava on 28 Apr 2010 9:33 PM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 28 Apr 2010 9:54 PM:

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