Orthography. The Hindi-Urdu debate also contained within it the Nagari-Nastaliq debate. While spoken Hindustani was a promising middle ground between the two high registers, the associated Nastaliq and Nagari alphabets are incompatible in every aspect of format, leaving little room for compromise. Arguments brought up against both scripts included speed of writing, standards for spelling, and ability to be converted to modern technology, like typewriters (King 1994, 61; Shackle and Xxxxx 1990, 130). The Roman alphabet and Devanagari, at least, are both oriented from left to right; however, the same problem of basic orthographical differences remain. The established pattern of the hybrid language adopting the writing system of the invading language suggests that Roman script is more likely to be used for Hinglish if and when it is formally standardized. The following analysis, then, compares strategies used to adapt Devanagari to Urdu phonemes—or even Persian script to Hindustani phonemes— and Roman script to Hinglish phonemes. As Xxxxxx Xxxx points out, Hindi in Devanagari has completely different letters for dental and retroflex letters, such as /t/ (त) and /ʈ/ (ट), as well as for aspirated and non-aspirated stops and affricates (ex. /b/ ब, /bʰ/ भ ). However, Urdu, while employing the same sounds, marks retroflex sounds with “a diacritic mark... so that retroflex sounds are written with the same basic graphemes as /t d r/ but marked with the diacritic for retroflexion” (King 2001, 50-51). For example, the same aforementioned dental and retroflex plosives would be written as ت and ٹ. Similarly, aspiration is signaled by the letter for the non-aspirated counterpart immediately followed by a do-chasmi he, a modified form of the letter /h/ (ex. /b/ ب , /bʰ/ ھب). Hinglish, like Urdu, signals aspiration by adding the letter h (ex. /b/ b, /bʰ/ bh). Hinglish also recognizes the similar plosive quality of /t/ and the retroflex /ʈ/, but unlike Urdu (which signals the difference between the sounds with diacritics), Hinglish uses the same grapheme, t, for both with no mark to distinguish the two. Finally, the vocalic nasalization is marked in Hindi by a symbol, ◌ँ, called a chandrabindu, which is graphemically separate from any stand-alone nasal sounds (न ण ऩ ञ). In Urdu, the letter noon ن is used for all non-coda nasal phonemes, regardless of its corresponding Devanagari grapheme, while the noon-ghunna, a modified form of the letter without a dot, is used for nasalized vowels at...
