Articles
Two unrelated languages, a thousand years of contact. These are the essays that ship inside the Bhashalu app, here in full so they are easy to share: which words crossed between Hindi and Telugu, which doorway they came through, and which resemblances only look like kinship.
Two unrelated languages, a thousand shared words
Hindi is Indo-Aryan. Telugu is Dravidian. No family tree connects them, yet a Hindi speaker starting Telugu keeps meeting familiar words. Both facts are true, and this whole project lives in the gap between them.
The Deccan doorway
Golconda and Hyderabad ran on Persian for centuries, and Telugu quietly pocketed the vocabulary. How kharchu, javaabu, and kaburu got in, and how a single vowel made them look native.
Why Telugu sounds so Sanskrit
Telugu did not descend from Sanskrit, but its formal register is saturated with it. On tatsama, tadbhava, the -am ending that often points toward the borrowed layer, and why a borrowed wardrobe does not change the skeleton.
Same grandparent, different scripts
Devanagari and Telugu script are both grandchildren of Brahmi, which is why the alphabet charts rhyme row by row while the languages stay strangers. Also: what పాత and పాట know that paata cannot say.
False friends and true cousins
Hindi phool and Telugu puvvu both mean flower and look like an obvious match. They are unrelated, and the proof runs through Kannada. A field guide to telling inheritance from borrowing from coincidence.
