Hindi Lessons/Lesson 9

Lesson 9: Numbers up to 20. Wh-questions and other question-words.

Here is a table of the numbers up to 20:

Next come the question words:


 * क्या (kya) = What?
 * कौन (kaun) = Who?
 * कहां (kaha~) = Where?
 * क्यों (kyo~) = Why?
 * कैसा / कैसे / कैसी (kaisa/kaise/kaisi) = How?
 * कितना / कितने / कितनी (kitna/kitne/kitni) = How much?, How many?

So, basically, that was the lesson, but I forgot something to tell you about. It's concerning the numbers. The Devanagari script even possess its own letters for writing the numbers, but those are not used much in our time. However I'll give them here too:


 * १ = 1
 * २ = 2
 * ३ = 3
 * ४ = 4
 * ५ = 5
 * ६ = 6
 * ७ = 7
 * ८ = 8
 * ९ = 9
 * १० = 10

As you can see they resembles the ""Arabic"" ciphers we use, and it should be so, since actually the Arabic ciphers are INDIAN ciphers. The writing system, on base 10, developed in India, where people used to write numbers with the letters you see above... Later Arabs adopted that system and brought it all over the word, thus it became known as "Arabic numbers"... By the way, written in Devanagari, the year, in which I'm writing these lesson will look as २०१०...