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This paper delves into the intricate semantic nuances and sociopragmatic functions inherent in the Marathi address term "māuli" in the context of a colossal religious gathering. Through morphosyntactic analysis, it uncovers the term's grammatical gender and its generic usage to encompass feminine and motherly attributes, embracing inclusiveness and generosity. Drawing from primary data collected during the Aṣāḍhi pilgrimage of 2023 through semi-structured interviews and participant observations, supplemented by secondary sources such as albums and songs, the study quantitatively and qualitatively examines the frequency and contextual use of "māuli". Findings reveal its multifaceted sociopragmatic functions, including identity establishment, solidarity marking, politeness expression, and religiosity demonstration. However, its efficacy is constrained by temporal and spatial limitations, potentially hindering broader societal benefits. This exploration sheds light on the complex interplay between linguistic expressions, social dynamics, and religious practices within the Marathi cultural milieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with "A Comparative Analysis of Kasaragod Marathi and Native Marathi: Exploring Kinship Terms" and the Marathas represent a tribal community predominantly residing in the Kallar and Panathadi panchayats located within the Kasaragod district, the northernmost district of Kerala. They are also present in regions such as Coorg, Madikkeri, and Sullia in Karnataka. The majority of their settlements are situated in the eastern hills of the Kerala district. The Marathas communicate using a language known as Marathi, which lacks a written script and differs from the Marathi language spoken by the people in the state of Maharashtra, India. The primary aim of this study is to investigate the kinship terms used in the Marathi language and determine whether there are any similarities with the indigenous Marathi kinship terms in Maharashtra. The objectives of the study are as follows: ⚫ To conduct a comprehensive examination of the similarities and differences between Kasaragod Marathi and native Marathi, with a specific focus on the distinct characteristics and variations in kinship terms used within the Marathi language spoken in the Kasaragod region. This analysis aims to shed light on the unique aspects of kinship terminology in Kasaragod Marathi and its divergence from the native Marathi language. ⚫ To investigate the influence of the Malayalam and Kannada languages on Kasaragod Marathi. It aims to identify the specific linguistic features that have been influenced by these neighbouring languages. ⚫ To investigate the impact of migration on the Kasaragod Marathi language, specifically focusing on the phenomenon of word loss or lack of words as a result of migration. This objective aims to identify the specific linguistic challenges faced by the Kasaragod Marathi-speaking community due to migration, including the loss or reduced usage of certain words or expressions, and how this has influenced the overall language vitality and preservation efforts in the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language comprehension has been a fascinating area of research for grammarians, linguists, philosophers and computer scientists alike. In Marathi grammatical tradition, a sentence is viewed from the verb-centric position in several treatises. Moreover, the complete discussion is put in a theoretical framework. The current report, the extension of earlier research on the Marathi language, adopts an experimental outlook to examine the communicative aspect of the sentence in colloquial (non-standard variety) Marathi written conversations. Based on the subjective reports of 95 native and non-native readers obtained from four experiments it is argued that a single-verb in a conversation is comprehensible hence can be regarded as a complete sentence itself. The contrastive analysis suggests that complete sentences are easier to process than single-verb sentences, which in turn, are more accurately comprehended than nominal sentences. Resorting on textual and sociolinguistic variables, the report also probes into the underlying nuances of language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To validate the Revised Urinary Incontinence Scale (RUIS) in Marathi language and find its reliability in females of Pune Methodology: A pilot study was done on 30 sujects who were given RUIS in English and Marathi language and were asked to fil the questionnaire. After the completion of this,the marathi scale was given to 101 subjects for cross cultural adaptation into Marathi language. Along with the translated version, subjects were also given the International Consultation on Incontinence Questionnaire -- Urinary Incontinence Short Form (ICIQ-UI SF). Result: The translated version of RUIS showed a good internal consistency( r=0.88) and good test re-test reliability( r=0.86). The construct validity of Marathi RUIS was seen to be (Cronbach's alpha) 0.882 and the convergent validity was calculated by correlating the Marathi RUIS with ICIQ-UI SF, which was found to b p= 0.756. Conclusion: The translated version of RUIS show good validity and reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diplomacy was a principal site of linguistic and cultural exchange in the early modern Persianate world. Focusing on the karārnāmā or agreement, this paper explores how a repertoire of Marathi and Persian documentary genres, binding formulae, and graphic procedures enabled legal, commercial, and diplomatic transactions in eighteenth-century western India. The exchange of written agreements facilitated interstate relations as well as profit-sharing contractual arrangements between individuals. Despite their centrality to interactions between European and South Asian polities, these instruments met with limited success in establishing rights to property under the legal regime of the East India Company-state and instead acquired new functions in colonial revenue administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kaulnāmā s were ubiquitous in early modern Marathi bureaucratic documentation. They were issued as deeds of assurance offering protection and confirming various rights, especially during warfare or invasion. Such documents were issued at different levels of the administrative hierarchy in the Adilshahi and Maratha administrations to prevent flight from troubled areas, extend cultivation, and encourage commerce. They also recorded grants of waste land to cultivators on graduated rates of taxation, or to merchants for developing market towns. This paper historicizes the kaulnāmā form from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries, exploring the kinds of transactions of power, sovereignty and property it was part of. Through this focus on the trajectory of particular documentary forms, it reflects on the nature of the Persianate within Marathi bureaucratic practices, and the history of the Marathi language more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context: The Common Object Token (COT) test is used in clinical settings to assess the complex closed-set speech perception skills in children with hearing impairment. Aims: The translation, adaptation, and validation of the COT test for the Sinhalese language of Sri Lanka served as a model for the study presented here. The same procedure was used to adapt the original English-language test to the Marathi language of West India. The finalized Marathi version was tested on children with normal hearing (NH). Its applicability to pediatric Marathi-speaking cochlear implant (CI) recipients was demonstrated. Materials and Methods: The forward/backward translation method was used to translate the original English-language test into Marathi. The Marathi version was assessed, adapted, and finalized by healthcare professionals and teachers who are native Marathi speakers and competent speakers of the English language. The finalized version was administered to 100 children with NH (mean age: 5.6 years; range: 2.7-9 years). Sixteen recipients of CIs manufactured by MED-EL (Innsbruck, Austria) were tested with the finalized Marathi version (mean age: 7.5 years; range: 3.5-12.5 years). Results: The original English-language COT test was designed with two levels of subtests arranged in an order of increasing difficulty. The subtests of each level of the finalized Marathi version were shown to follow this arrangement, which could be observed from the test scores in both the children with NH and the children with CIs. A strong correlation between the total score and each subtest score for both levels 1 and 2 were found in both groups. Good internal reliability and consistency were observed in the group with NH for both test levels. Conclusions: The COT test was translated, adapted, and validated for Marathi by administering it to children with NH. The finalized Marathi version was easily administered to pediatric CI recipients. It is recommended as a standard, validated tool for assessing the speech perception of pediatric Marathi-speaking CI recipients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a challenging and equally exciting encounter itself to study tribal folksongs although scripted in Marathi dialect. An endeavour towards a study that has been unexplored for centuries introduces a space of bliss. In the first place, the tribal folklore continues as dormant further folksong in it is farther too difficult to obtain, decode and interpret and its study is another tougher task for any scholar. Since every tribal culture differs in many respects still shares some common links but surely cannot be treated to be same for any study like this. As mentioned earlier, the folklore is in a Marathi dialect but there are many linguistic varieties within the dialect depending upon the different tribes. Tribal folk literature witnesses the lingual and cultural impacts in the course of language exchange, migration for employment and business or education etc. Hence the non-tribal culture unawares continues to impact and influence not only the ethnic users of folk language but also the rural community. Of several cultural festivals and celebrations and stages of human life, this piece attempts to explore a couple of them strewn in eight tribal folksongs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentiment Analysis is initial step of Emotion Recognition which is one of the driving force in the area of research in Artificial Intelligence. Availability of large Web text and improved tools in Natural Language Processing are attracting researchers to this field. However there is tremendous research scope in Marathi Language spoken mainly in Maharashtra, India which is very ancient and rich in morphology. This paper presents an attempt to develop a machine learning model for sentiment classification of Marathi Corpus . N Gram feature of word and polarity of each word is considered to calculate document polarity. Both Negative score and Positive score are fed to classifiers and performance is compared. The conclusion doesn't stop on any one of the classifier but SVM and Logistic Regression gives overall good results in all circumstances. Stochastic Gradient Descent gives highest accuracy for both bigram and trigram features when 70:30 split is used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sixteenth-century Marathi poet-saint Eknāth is better known for his devotional songs (abhaṅg) and allegorical drama-poems (bhārūḍ) than his "philosophical" writings. These writings include commentaries on and distillations of Sanskrit texts that feature a highly localized form of Advaita, or non-dualist Vedānta. Rather than consider them vernacular translations of the classical traditions of Advaita, I propose to read Eknāth's philosophical works as embedded in a local context of non-dualist thought that filtered into the elite world of Sanskrit knowledge-systems. I provide examples from his Marathi commentary on the Sanskrit Hastāmalaka Stotra, a brief versified teaching on Advaita Vedānta. I also look at the para-textual material bracketing the content and some of the accompanying manuscript record, in order to understand the context for circulation and transmission of this material among Eknāth's various readers over generations. My general attempt is to understand how ideas and practices belonging to local, vernacular networks filter into elite Sanskrit systems of knowledge—that is, not just into flexible genres like purāṇa but into disciplines, like Vedānta, that are generally viewed as impervious to the world around them. From my perspective, all knowledge is local, even that articulated in such cosmopolitan languages as Sanskrit. In Eknāth's vernacular Advaita, we find evidence for a much wider scope for the movement of ideas, one that moves not from top-down but bottom-up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings to light the comparison of Dalit writing in Tamil and Marathi. India being one of the fastest developing countries in the world, yet well known for its rigid caste system. This paper will pitch the dark side of history of suppression and how the writers help to heal the scars of subjugation of the Dalit community with special reference to the writers Bama and Urmila. Urmila Pawar, a writer and activist, is a noticeable personality in the Dalit and feminist movements in Marathi language. Her works exhibit social discrimination and the plight of women in the subjugated community. Bama Soosairaj, a teacher and a novelist, identified, as Tamil Dalit feminist is known for her writing on the sufferings of the underprivileged community and the struggle they undergo to shed that identity. The paper also separates the unambiguous realities of dalits, specially the lives of Dalit women and their commendable attempts to upraise socially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research paper analyzes the speech act of Correction performed by the Marathi speakers both in English and Marathi languages as a response to three situations each in English and Marathi demanding speech act of correction in Discourse Completion Tests. For the purpose, the responses of50 post-graduate students of Shivaji University to Discourse Completion Tests in English and Marathi are collected and analyzed by preparing a model of speech act of Correction. Thefocus of study is to explore the manner and nature of speech act, the semantic strategies in 'which the head act is realized, the organization structure of the response and the preferred supportive moves. The analysis and the resultant conclusions are presented in terms of comparison between English and Marathi Correction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the extracurricular work of education and language revitalization by two non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Pune, a city in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. It demonstrates how these NGOs respond to anxieties and fears of language shift, language death, and social change in ways that fill a gap in how connections of language to society are addressed in the formal education system in Pune. These NGOs recreate structures of hierarchies among socioeconomic classes in their work of language preservation, assigning to lower classes the task of maintaining Marathi as an everyday language and delegating the promotion of Marathi "high culture" forms such as the arts to the upper classes. The article illuminates ways in which Marathi use and language ideologies shape socioeconomic class identifications and how ideologies about language and language use take different forms based on needs defined through a socioeconomic class lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper is a modest attempt to assess the way the speech act of Request is performed in English and Marathi. For the purpose, data are collected from 50 post-graduate students using DCT. Three situations each in English and Marathi are used and the respondents are asked to respond to the situations. The analysis of the data shows that there an certain differences in the realization pattern of the speech act in English and Marathi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author talks about challenges he faced while translating the book "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" by John Cleland into Marathi titled "E.ka Vaa.rang.ne.chi Smru.ti.chi.tre." It informs that doing so he paid careful attention to the extent to which the translator's visibility, to cite Lawrence Venuti, is necessary so that the reader is continually reminded of the novel's status as a foreign literary product. It also informs that the book depicts human sexuality.

Highlights • Acoustic analysis of plain and breathy voiced obstruents and sonorants in Marathi is presented. • Breathy sonorants are associated with increased spectral tilt and increased noise. • This finding is consistent with findings for breathy obstruents and vowels. • Differences between plain and breathy consonants are diminished in sonorant contexts, however. • The acoustic facts may help explain the typological underrepresentation of breathy sonorants. Abstract Breathy voiced sonorant consonants are typologically rare, more so than other non-modal sonorants (e.g. voiceless sonorants, which are widely attested in language families like Tibeto-Burman and Otomanguean). Similarly, they are more vulnerable to diachronic loss than voiceless sonorants (e.g. in Tibeto-Burman). The acoustic correlates of breathiness in sonorants have not been thoroughly investigated, and a question arises as to whether there is a tie between their acoustics and their typology: does the acoustic encoding of breathiness in sonorants contribute to their typological scarcity? The current study probes this question via instrumental acoustic analysis of breathy and modal obstruents and sonorants in Marathi, an Indic language. Measures standardly used to assess voice quality (F0, H1*-H2*, H1*-A1*, H1*-A2*, H1*-A3*, and Cepstral Peak Prominence) are reported. As expected, breathy voiced obstruents are associated with increased values in the H1-based measures and decreased values in Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP), a measure which reflects the presence of noise in the signal. Sonorants show the same general trend, with higher H1-based measures and lower CPP associated with breathy than with plain sonorants, but the differences between plain and breathy consonants is greater in obstruents than in sonorants. Specifically, the acoustic correlates of breathy voice are diminished in post-sonorant contexts. It is proposed that phonemic breathy voice is not acoustically encoded as robustly in sonorant consonants as in obstruents, and that this helps explain the typology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hidden Markov Model and Deep Neural Networks based Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis systems, gain a significant attention from researchers because of their flexibility in generating speech waveforms in diverse voice qualities as well as in styles. This paper describes HMM-based speech synthesis system (SPSS) for the Marathi language. In proposed synthesis method, speech parameter trajectories used for synthesis are generated from the trained hidden Markov models (HMM). We have recorded our database of 5300 phonetically balanced Marathi sentences to train the context-dependent HMM with five, seven and nine hidden states. The subjective quality measures (MOS and PWP) shows that the HMMs with seven hidden states are capable of giving an adequate quality of synthesized speech as compared to five state and with less time complexity than seven state HMMs. The contextual features used for experimentation are inclusive of a position of an observed phoneme in a respective syllable, word, and sentence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thesis is a critical study of Kristapuraāṇa (1616), a seventeenth century retelling of the biblical narrative in the Marathi language composed by the Jesuit missionary, Thomas Stephens. Stephens's poetic composition is one of the earliest printed works in South Asia. In this thesis, Kristapuraāṇa, is studied as a work of cultural translation. The study highlights the methods that early missionaries adopted to negotiate the complexities of cultural encounters. The meeting between Christianity and ancient sacred traditions that existed in colonial centres such as Portuguese Goa gave rise to novel translation "strategies" to convince the masses regarding the significance of Christianity and to negotiate the stringent regulations laid down by the Church. The transformation of Stephens, an English Jesuit, from a traveller to a poet-priest-translator is treated as key to understanding the cultural translation undertaken in Kristapuraāṇa. The language of the text and the Roman script in which it was first printed are significant in understanding the sociopolitical background against which Stephens's text was composed. The routes by which early Christian texts in South Asia travelled is also studied, with Kristapuraāṇa as the epicentre for analysis. Travel, transformation, genre, and landscapes are the lenses through which the concept of cultural translation has been approached in this thesis. The anxieties faced by both the translator and the "translated" in the process of grappling with the "sacred" are important concerns of this study. Select verses from the ten thousand nine hundred and sixty-two verses of Kristapuraāṇa have been translated into English in this study, to bring out the nuances of the text and to augment the conceptual arguments put forward by the thesis. In Kristapuraāṇa, Stephens made use of the purāṇic genre to negotiate the spaces between Christianity and Hinduism. Stephens chose to call his composition a "Purāṇa", placing it firmly within the tradition of purāṇic texts and the conventions of sacredness attached to the tradition by the locals. He negotiated two sacred textual traditions--the biblical and the purāṇic--and both the biblical narrative and the genre of Purāṇas are transformed in this process of translation. In this context, a strand of this thesis analyses the novelization of the purāṇic genre in Kristapurāṇa. In addition to these aspects, Stephens's text opens a site that reveals the centrality of landscapes in the colonial enterprise, the fascination with distant geographies, and the transformation of the physical and cultural landscapes of conquered regions. The vast deserts, tropical gardens, and desolate cities in this narrative reveal a constant process of travel across space and time. A reading of landscapes in this text brings to light the ways in which Stephens's landscapes were a (re)invention of the topology in which the locals could position their memories and traditions. Landscape is treated as an aspect of cultural translation in the context of Kristapurāṇa. The transformations and (re)creations that occur when sacred texts and traditions undergo cultural translation are highlighted in this reading of Kristapurāṇa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay tries to understand how conversion to Christianity can transform language and its rhetorical possibilities inwardly. In the case of Jyotirao Phule, who was not a convert but was a critic of caste distinctions in nineteenth-century Western India, this meant that Marathi could now be used to uncover the link between Hindu apologetics and Brahmanism. Here I argue that the ‘humble’ Marathi used in missionary tracts made possible the emergence of the ‘I’ of the convert, and pushed ‘religion’ into the gap opened up in social life by a crisis of values, a crisis productively instrumentalised by Phule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numeral recognition is one of the most indispensable applications in pattern recognition. Recognizing numerals, written in Indian languages is a demanding problem. Devanagari Marathi is one such popular Indian language script, and perceiving Marathi numerals written in different patterns, is a challenging task. Depending on the type of feature extraction, varied approaches dealing with numeral recognition, have been suggested and practiced on smaller data-sets. However, no standard large data-set is available for handwritten Marathi numerals. Therefore, a data-set with 80000 samples has been prepared for proposed work. This paper proposes a Customized Convolutional Neural Network (CCNN) that has the ability to learn the features automatically and predict the class of numerals from a wide ranged data-set. Additionally, visualization of the intermediate CCNN layers is presented that explains the dynamics of the presented network. Out of 80000 numerals, written in Marathi, 70000 samples are used for training and 10000, for testing. The CCNN’s performance when verified using K- fold cross validation has achieved average 94.93% accuracy for testing data-sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authorship Identification is the task of identifying who wrote a given piece of text from a given set of candidate authors (suspects). The increasingly large volumes of texts on the Internet enhance the great yet urgent necessity for authorship identification. For this purpose, a large amount of work has already been done for the English language. Comparatively, less research has been carried out for Indian regional languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and Punjabi whereas no such experiment is available for Marathi. In this study presented a strategy for authorship identification of the documents written in Marathi language. Moreover, we adopted a set of fine-grained lexical and stylistic features for the analysis of the text and used them to develop two different models (statistical similarity model and SMORDT-Sequential minimal optimization with rule- based Decision Tree approach). Then, we validated the feature extraction method to show consistent significance in every model used in this experiment. The performance of the proposed approach has been evaluated based on the values of Recall, Precision, F-measure and Accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Marathi language has historically had digraphia and certainly in the period of the eighteenth century when the Maratha confederacy was at its greatest. While the debate between the uses of a single script for rendering the Marathi language became relevant only after the advent of printing in the nineteenth century, the fast changing social and political landscapes lent their own weight to the discourse. In just 150 years, the war was won by Devanagari, but at least three different debates had been fought. The first argument was about printing types and the legibility and economy of Devanagari. By the end of the nineteenth century, social empowerment of the literati and administrative convenience were the issues debated. By the early twentieth century, the British administration in India embarked on a project of undermining nationalist efforts in western India, particularly among the Marathi-speaking peoples by chipping away at the softer forms of sovereignty like the Modi script. Even sectarian arguments were invoked in justifying the use of Devanagari, drawing upon divisions of language, religion, and caste. This history has largely been forgotten, and the popular narrative is that the British were responsible for the end of the Modi writing system. Ironically, the demise of the Modi script was a result of the nationalist policies of forcing a culturally unified Indian Union and instituting a state where Marathi became the official language. Modern federalism as part of nationalist secularism takes Marathi for granted as static and ancient Nagari phenomena, and this essay explains the political genealogy of its struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dalit literature originally emerged in the Marathi language as a literary response to the everyday oppressions of caste in mid-twentieth-century independent India, critiquing caste practices by experimenting with various literary forms. Subsequently, Dalit literature emerged as a remarkable phenomenon in various Indian languages. By commenting on a selection of poems from Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam, this essay introduces Dalit poetry against the backdrop of the various historical contexts within which they emerged. It suggests that though the anticaste consciousness that developed in Maharashtra (in western India) played an influential role in Dalit poetry, the distinct historical contexts and specific concerns of various vernacular publics were what shaped the poetry in each language. The essay also suggests that Dalit poetry does not sit easily with the nomenclature of “Indian literature” or “Indian writing” due to the ways in which the concept “Dalit” emerged as a critique of national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focus or prominence is an important linguistic function of prosody. The acoustic realisation of prominence in an utterance, in most languages, involves one or more acoustic dimensions while affecting one or more words in the utterance. It is of interest to identify the acoustic correlates as well as their possible interaction in the production and perception of focus. In this article, we consider the acoustics of focus in Marathi. Previous studies on Hindi, the more researched member of the Indo-Aryan family, have reported that the well-known rising F0 pattern on non-final content words in an utterance becomes hyper-articulated when the word is in focus. The associated F0 excursion, duration and intensity increase and are accompanied by post-focal compression of pitch range. A preliminary goal of the present study was to verify whether Marathi exhibits similar behaviour. We used Subject–Object–Verb (SOV) structured utterances with elicited focus on each word by 12 native Marathi speakers. We observed that each narrow focus location is accompanied by a distinct set of local and global acoustic correlates in F0 , duration and intensity which closely parallel previous observations on Hindi. F0 cues were also examined via the accent command amplitudes of the Fujisaki model. F0 range, duration and intensity were found to vary significantly with focus condition prompting a study to examine their relative importance in the perceptual judgement of focus. Perception testing with synthetically manipulated utterances revealed that duration cues are interpreted in a categorical manner, relatively uninfluenced by the pitch cues. Only when duration is ambiguous, does the on-focus F0 cue appear to play a role. An explanation for this may lie in the normal F0 -rise characteristic of the content words in Marathi, making pitch a less dependable functional cue for focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the need of using Marathi language in higher education in urban Maharashtra for better understanding of students. Topics include difficulties faced by teachers in navigating linguistic landscape in classrooms with diverse language proficiencies; creating and solidifying linguistic identities of students; and efforts made by Maharshtrian government for creating broad range of student identities across diverse socioeconomic classes, languages and ethnicities.

Marathi cinema is a prominent regional film industry located in Mumbai, Pune and Kolhapur in western India. Since its early history, this film industry has evolved within a network of performance forms like the Marathi theatre, folk music and dance, and devotional singing (abhanga and kirtan), and the inter-exchange of personnel between these cultural formations. When the state of Maharashtra was constituted in 1960, this networked formation became even more prominent, and had to negotiate the rising competition from the more dominant Hindi cinema. Marathi cinema also had to contend with the patronage of Marathi audiences for other artistic forms like the theatre and folk performances. The attempt here is to theorize this state of in-betweenness through a spatial detailing and critical mapping of industrial tendencies, textual practices and regional entrenchment. The questions that informs this study are directed to understand regional cinema in India, and its manifestations over the decades of 1960 to 1980. Specifically, the article forwards some propositions to the ideas of: how can the history of Marathi cinema be situated against the dominant and collocative national Hindi cinema industry, with which it shares a common geography of filmmaking, exhibition and audiences? And how the concepts of social and cultural space can be extended to analyse some distinctive historical tendencies of the Marathi cinema? This analysis proposes a dialectics of space for a regional Marathi film practice, which is confirmed by a reading of films, anecdotal biographies, archival materials and trade journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines letters written by young men to the Marathi-language journal Samaj Swasthya and its editor, R. D. Karve, a major advocate of birth control and sex education in western India. The letters, and Karve's responses to them, constituted perhaps the earliest sex-advice column in Indian print media. We argue here that the correspondence provides a unique vehicle for understanding the forms of sexual knowledge held by middle-class males in mid-twentieth-century India as well as for appreciating their most significant sexual anxieties. The article analyses the concerns expressed in the letters about masturbation and seminal emissions, the nature of the female body and processes of conception, birth control and same-sex sexual practices. It particularly illuminates the ways in which the concept of modern conjugality pervaded the sexual understandings of the young men who wrote to Karve. It thus offers valuable insights into specifically sexual aspects of conjugality and masculinity—aspects that have previously been unexplored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview of Marathi language translations. Topics discussed include the 19th century history of translation in India, the aspects of Marathi translations in Sanskrit language, and the ideological impacts of its translations. Information on the translations of Marathi writings into English and other languages is also provided.

While the debates about the use of a single script for rendering the Marathi language became relevant only after the advent of printing, the fast-changing social and political landscapes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lent their own weight to the discourse. The debates about the writing system became the venue for various competing social forces and political movements. The issues of region, caste, class, and religion—the core of today's identity politics—were all embroiled in this debate, as were both the British colonial and Indian nationalist governments. In just 150 years, Balbodh (a variant of Devanagari) emerged as the sole script for the Marathi language. At least three different arguments were used to dismiss the Modi script. The first was about printing types, and the legibility and economy of Devanagari. By the end of the nineteenth century, the social empowerment of the literati and administrative convenience were the reasons given for abolishing Modi. In the twentieth century, British resistance to nationalist efforts in western India, and then a fear of regionalism under the new nationalist independent republic, ensured that a single script able to be used for both Hindi and Sanskrit would be officially sanctioned for Marathi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ontology is defined as shared specification of conceptual vocabulary used for formulating knowledge-level theories about a domain of discourse. Dataset is created by manually collecting information about different diseases related to crops. Ontology modeling is used for knowledge representation of various domains. India is an agricultural based economic country. Majority of Indian population relies on farming but the technologies are sparsely used for the aid of farmers. Ontology based modeling for agricultural knowledge can change this scenario. The farmers can understand it easily in their native language. We proposed a system which will model and extract knowledge in Marathi language. In this paper, we review various existing agriculture ontology's along with some of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models. Model ontology for agriculture domain system aims to retrieve relevant answers to the farmer's query. We explored Rule-Based and Conditional Random Fields based models for Ontology extraction. The extraction methods and preprocessing phases of proposed system is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speech recognition or speech to text processing, is a process of recognizing human speech by the computer and converting into text. In speech recognition, transcripts are created by taking recordings of speech as audio and their text transcriptions. Speech based applications which include Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques are popular and an active area of research. Input to such applications is in natural language and output is obtained in natural language. Speech recognition mostly revolves around three approaches namely Acoustic phonetic approach, Pattern recognition approach and Artificial intelligence approach. Creation of acoustic model requires a large database of speech and training algorithms. The output of an ASR system is recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers and computerized devices. ASR today finds enormous application in tasks that require human machine interfaces like, voice dialing, and etc. Our key contribution in this paper is to create corpora for Marathi language and explore the use of Sphinx engine for automatic speech recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An era of multi-lingual web contents has begun. Web users add, update and search contents in local languages. Automatic translator scripts present available contents in local languages. Therefore, web is attracting users from all levels of society. This advancement has initiated research for text retrieval techniques in local languages. Research community is working on many aspects of this area. In-depth survey reveals retrieval techniques for Marathi language are slightly explored. This work is a proposal towards better text retrieval in Marathi. It suggests system to cluster relevant Marathi news from multiple sources on web. Its application enables rich exploration of Marathi contents on web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is not an essay about mysticism in the Deccan. The aim is neither to track the movement of holy men and cults into the Deccan, nor the expansion of their networks and the creation of sacred geographies; this essay is also not about the comparative textual and spiritual discourses of saints from different sects. Instead, the attempt here is to suggest that every geographical region had a complex world of religious domains and of life-worlds in which multiple faith-agencies were active, catering to different audiences. There were some spiritual agencies that were part of larger ‘global’ networks, and others which were ‘local’ or vernacular. The term ‘vernacular’ is a description not necessarily limited to the discursive language used. This vernacular life-world was shaped by a several factors, natural and cultural: geographical realities, shared political and historical memories. Even if such a vernacular region, in this case, the Deccan, was a part of an ‘Islamic frontier’ politically and spiritually, certain vernacular traditions such as the Marathi literary spiritual movement cannot be easily accommodated within such a model of frontiers, contact zones and interfaces. This essay considers literary and spiritual practices in the northern Deccan from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, primarily in the Marathi language, to demonstrate a spatial and conceptual character that was not just linguistic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Segmentation process is the heart of handwritten Script Identification system. Aside from the large variation of individual's handwriting, many researchersfound difficulty to separate characters from scanned word document Image. The key factor of selection of segmentation algorithm is used to improve efficiency of character segmentation as well as good feature extraction. One of the feature of Marathi script is Compound Character, derived from Devnagari, occur rarely in the script. Segmentation of such type characters is very difficult due to their complex structure. This paper proposed new technique for segmentation of handwritten Marathi compound characters. The Proposed algorithm used the concept of Minutiae extraction for fingerprint for segmenting the compound character. Basically Segmentation is carried out using morphological operations such as erosion and dilation. For segmenting the character from compound character our aim to find termination point and bifurcation points. And for finding the termination and bifurcation point proposed algorithm used the morphological operation hit or miss transform. The experimentalresults shows 90% accuracy in finding termination and bifurcation points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detecting the sentence boundary forms the basic step for many natural language applications. A lot of work has been done in this direction for English and other foreign languages. But not much work has been done for Indian languages. This paper proposes a rule based system for correctly identifying the boundary of the sentence written in Marathi. The task of identifying a sentence end in Marathi is made complex by the fact that Marathi language do not have indication of sentence start like the English has capital letters for indicating the start of new sentences. The system uses certain rules to correctly determine the end of sentence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing a text to speech (TTS) system, commonly referred as TTS, that sounds similar to human natural speech is being attempted over the years, but still not achieved by even the best of presently available TTS algorithms. Most of these still sound robotic, unless human speech itself is present in them. However, such human speech necessitates creation of a large database of each and every word of that language which is quite an onerous task. This research article illustrates a new approach and methodology that helps to reduce database size by using 'syllabic based concatenative speech synthesis'. In this method, new words are 'created' using existing words and syllables from the database. The naturalness of these 'created' words in speech are further improved by 'position based syllabification 'and 'objective spectral noise reduction'. A combination of neural and classification network and non-neural methods are used for syllabification. After new words are 'created', the spectral distortion present at joints is reduced with objective spectral estimation and reduction methods in time and frequency domains. These approaches result in improved naturalness for proposed Marathi-TTS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English has been a dominant feature of daily communication. In a multilingual country like India, English works as a connecting thread among people of different linguistic backgrounds. It proves to be a helping hand to anyone who does not share the linguistic code used in other states. English is so merged in our languages that it seems nearly impossible to use any state language without words from English. Sociolinguistics has a wider scope in a multilingual setting like India. Code mixing and code switching as sociolinguistic terms seem natural in such a multilingual setting. Nevertheless, analysing language use in such a setting is an enriching experience for those who are interested in sociolinguistic study. The present paper explores the issue of code mixing as a sociolinguistic device and discusses formal and functional aspects of code mixing in specific relation to Marathi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is devoted to analyse the selected poems by Marathi Dalit poets who incorporate frustration, depression, irritation, etc., in their poems as the emerging themes. The paper identifies how in post-Ambedkarian era, Dalits have tried to assert their identity in various quarters of life: politics, religion, education and economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the study was three fold: one, to investigate the developmental trend of inflectional morphemes, second, to study the relation between morphological awareness and reading comprehension and lastly, to compare the development of inflection between genders. Marathi is an inflected and an agglutinative language; where affixes are attached to the root morpheme altering the person, number gender and tense. Marathi has poly-morphemic words and free word order. Hence knowledge of inflection is highly critical for comprehension of Marathi sentences. Sixty participants, thirty males and thirty females, from Grade III and Grade IV, were assessed on morphological awareness by a judgment task. Reading comprehension was assessed by answering questions on a reading passage. Results indicated significant developmental trend in inflectional morphemes from Grade III to Grade IV. Case marker was significant predictor of reading comprehension in grade III. No significant difference was observed between genders. We conclude that awareness of morphological skills improves reading comprehension and children start to read with meaning. The findings of this study and previous research suggest inclusion of assessment of morphological knowledge in early reading evaluation and intervention. It may also contribute to the assessment and intervention of children with learning disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marathi is the main official language in Maharashtra. In recent years, handwritten Marathi character recognition has captured a lot of attention as it has broad application in areas like passport, railways, postal address reading etc. Recognition of handwritten characters would decrease the task of data entry and save the time in case of Form filling, Banking and Postal Automation etc. This paper presents the various steps involved in recognition of handwritten characters and review of methods reported by various researchers for handwritten character recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Highlights: [•] “Real-world” data is used for speech recognition systems in 4 Indian languages. [•] The subspace Gaussian mixture model is effective for insufficient training data. [•] Cross-corpus acoustic mismatch is a serious issue for multi-lingual systems. [•] Apparent cross-lingual phonetic similarities for Hindi and Marathi are “discovered”. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article offers information on the ritual memorialization of Marathi language religious book Kirtan by the Tamil Smarta Brahmin community in Tamil Nadu, India. It is said that the memorialization embeds it within the powerful forces of Brahmin cultural production in modern Tamil Nadu. Tamil Brahmins emerge as the custodians of pan-Indian bhakti Hinduism.

An introduction to Keenan and Comrie's NPAH (noun phrase accessibility hierarchy) is followed by data showing to what extent Marathi's PPP s (prenominal participial phrases) do and do not conform to it. The range of constructional variety inside a PPP is shown to be related to the tightness or looseness of the relation of the predicate inside the PPP to the nulled element. Examples are presented of the puzzling absence of Agent and Experiencer noun phrases inside PPP s. The paper ends with examples and discussion of the mismatch or transfer of PPP modifiers away from the NP denoting the 'imagee' or entity depicted in an image to the NP denoting the image itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context: Exploring the characteristics of actor's voice is been the interest of the researchers in last two decades. Research on professional voice users in India is mostly concentrated on singers, teachers, radio jockeys etc. A literature search indicates two areas where more research is needed. Primarily detailing the way of perceptual evaluation of actor's voice (speaking voice) and correlating it acoustic parameters. Research needs to be carried out to find out whether the actors are special as in the strategies they use to project their voices in Indian contexts. Aims: The primary aim of the following study is to analyze acoustic and perceptual parameters for voice projection in actors and non-actors at three loudness levels and secondary aim is to find out correlation between them. Subjects and Methods: A total of 18 actors and 18 non-actors within the age range of 19-60 years participated in the study. Their voices were digitally recorded and analyzed using LTAS (Dr. Speech, Real Analysis-Tiger Electronics, Version 5) on frequency-intensity parameters. Result and Discussion: The result showed that there is a significant difference between actors and non-actors at stage performance level (P < 0.01). Pattern of spectral slope was found sharply falling with higher energy concentration in actors at 3-4 kHz. Perceptual parameters correlated moderately only with average f0 at stage performance level. Conclusion: Actors are efficient in projecting their voice perceptually than non-actors which is in correlation with acoustic parameters at stage performance level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to find out the problem areas in pronunciation faced by Marathi speakers of English and it also tries to find out the causes of these problems of mother tongue (L1) interference/ pull. After taking into consideration the problems of the learners, it also tries to suggest some pedagogical measures so that the problem of L1 interference will be not eradicated totally but certainly will be reduced to some extent. The sample taken for this paper is from S.N.D.T. Arts and Commerce College for girls, Pune. The students are from B.A. (Marathi medium). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]