A Hindi and Telugu dictionary, and a field guide to how the two have borrowed from each other for a thousand years.
Two languages that were never related, and share a thousand words anyway.
The honest version
Hindi is Indo-Aryan. Telugu is Dravidian. They are not siblings, not cousins, not the same language in two scripts. A Telugu speaker and a Hindi speaker do not understand each other by default, and no amount of shared vocabulary changes that.
What is true is more interesting. These two unrelated languages have lived beside each other for centuries, and they have been quietly trading words the whole time. Bhasha is about that traffic: which words crossed, which way they went, and which ones only look related.
Both scripts are also Brahmi's grandchildren. Same skeleton, different handwriting.
How words actually crossed
- Sanskrit, from above. Telugu borrowed enormously from Sanskrit, and its grammar names the layers precisely: tatsama (borrowed unchanged), tadbhava (borrowed and reshaped), and desya (native Dravidian stock). Hindi took from the same source. So when a Hindi word and a Telugu word match, they are usually cousins through a shared parent, not borrowings from each other.
- Persian and Arabic, from the Deccan. The Qutb Shahi and Asaf Jahi courts made Hyderabad a Persian and Deccani centre for centuries. That layer sits deep in Telugu, especially in Telangana.
- English, borrowed heavily and recently by both.
One rule unlocks hundreds of words. Perso-Arabic loans into Telugu usually take a final -u. Persian kharch becomes ఖర్చు kharchu. Arabic jawab becomes జవాబు javaabu. Once you hear it, you cannot stop hearing it.
What an entry looks like
Same meaning, entirely different words, from entirely different sources. Hindi reached for Arabic, Telugu for Sanskrit. This is the common case, and saying so plainly is the point.
Here they do match, and the reason matters: neither borrowed from the other. Both inherited the same Sanskrit word independently. In Hindi it is the formal register beside everyday kitaab; in Telugu it is simply the word.
Both took the same Persian word, and Telugu added its habitual final -u. The Deccan is the doorway this one came through.
Native Dravidian stock on one side, Indo-Aryan on the other. No connection at all, and there does not need to be. Most of everyday Telugu looks like this.
A note on accuracy
A wrong etymology is far worse than an honest "scholars disagree". Where a word's origin is genuinely unsettled, Bhasha says so rather than inventing a tidy story, and popular folk etymologies are debunked rather than repeated.
Telugu grammatical gender is also not Hindi's, and is not flattened into it. Telugu distinguishes masculine from non-masculine in the singular, and human from non-human in the plural, so "she" patterns with "it" in one and with "he" in the other. That is modelled properly, because it is one of the genuinely surprising things a Hindi speaker meets in Telugu.
In development
The dictionary is being built and verified now. This page will carry the download links when the apps are ready.
Planned for iPhone, iPad, Android and Mac.