Hindi/Urdu

Fri Jan 9 19:14:17 UTC 2004

Laxauyam:

A brief comment on Hindi/Urdu:

The situation there isn't like the Clatsop/Shoalwater/
Kathlamet/Wasco-Wishram situation.

Hindi and Urdu have pretty much exactly the same grammar and the same
basic vocabulary. if you can speak Hindi, you can speak Urdu too.
They're not 'dialects' in the usual sense. A simple sentence will have
exactly the same form in Hindi and in Urdu.   Many lexemes differ
between the two, with the Perso-Arabic influence on Urdu against th
Sanskrit influence on Hindi, and some of these differences enter the
basic vocabulary, and even to some Swadesh list items. BUT: Urdu has
Sanskrit-derived words for talking about Hinduism. And many sanskritisms
in Hindi were introduced during or after Indian Independence, to make
Hindi more 'Hindu' than Urdu.  And they came in with some phones only
used in Ssanskritisms, such as retroflex /n/ and /s/. Before then, many
words of Persian or Arabic origin were used by Hindu and Muslim alike,
especially if said Hindu was not literate.  Most Hindus used the Arabic
form /aurat/ for 'woman' rathe tha the Sanskrit word /stri:/, for
instance, or /a:dmi:/ rather than /manuSya/ for 'person'.    And many
still do. The 'Hindustani' tagt to soldiers and other employees of the
Raj was essentially Urdu.  This fact is heresy, of course, in an
increasingly natiobnaistic India, but it's still true.  Many Hindus had
to make an effort to learn many of the sanskritisms that people use ever
more freely nowadays.

Anthony Grant

>>> "Bruce, Colin" <Colin.Bruce at FRASERHEALTH.CA> 07/01/2004 18:17:04
>>>
Thanks for all that facinating stuff.  Back to the original question:
How
close were the upper and lower Chinookan languages?  Were they dialects
or
languages?  Were they like Fresian and English or like American and
British
English or Hindi and Urdu or Gitxsan and Nigsgaa?  I'm assuming there
were
no written differences but were there accent and vocabulary
differences?
Were there grammatical differences?

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Ros' Haruo [mailto:lilandbr at HOTMAIL.COM]
Sent:	Tuesday, January 06, 2004 8:20 PM
To:	CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Subject:	Re: Hindi/Urdu

As the old sociolinguistic saying has it, "A language is a dialect with
an
army". No absolute definition exists of the boundary between the terms,
but
in geopolitical terms the old saw has merit. There used to be "a
language"
in the Balkans called "Serbo-Croatian", which was written in either
the
Latin or the Cyrillic alphabet; "Croatian" was more likely to be
written in
Latin letters and/or by Roman Catholics, while "Serbian" was more
likely to
be written in Cyrillic and/or by Eastern Orthodox. Now, in the absence
of a
Yugoslav state, there are (at least) "three languages" covering the
same
linguistic ground: Croatian, Serbian, and *Bosnian*. I'm not sure
which
alphabet the Bosnians favor, but they are more likely to be Muslims
than are
the Croatians or Serbians.

An intriguing side issue is, how did American English manage to remain
"English" in the eyes of most of its speakers, notwithstanding two
wars
*against* the "English" and the hyperamericanism of our most
influential
lexicographer, Noah Webster?

A number of language-forms are spoken in China (and by people of Han
ethnicity outside China) - Cantonese, Wu, Hakka, Min, etc. - which on
normal
linguistic grounds are at least as different from each other as are
the
major Romance languages, yet because of the language-and-ethnicity
policies
of the People's Republic of China (in which, incidentally, Taiwan more
or
less concurs), all of these are routinely lumped together as "Chinese"
along
with the largest Chinese language, Mandarin.

> >I think we may need to consult Britannica for this.    Hindi and
Urdu
> >are spoken the same way but Urdu borrows more from Persian and
Arabic
> >while Hindi gets more Sanskrit.

That's true. Although both languages (or dialects) borrow heavily from
English for new technologically or mass-culturally necessitated terms,
the
official technical terminology (the same sort of words for which
English
would borrow Latin and especially Greek etyma [i.e. etymological
root-words]) in Urdu is mostly created from Arabic/Persian/Turkish -
in
other words, Islamic - etyma, while in Hindi the same sort of
terminology is
generally created from Sanskrit - in other words, Hindu - etyma. Also,
since
Urdu-speakers tend to be Muslims (or at least of Islamic heritage),
and
Hindi-speakers tend to be correspondingly Hindus (or grandchildren of
Hindus), the standard *greetings* (even though they are not exactly
technical or philosophical terminology) are from the corresponding
religious
sources: in Urdu one says "As-salaam u-alaikum", in Hindi "Namaste"...
(It's
worth noting that in East Africa among Swahili speakers the greetings
vary
quite a bit depending on the speakers' religious affiliations, but
they
don't claim to be speaking *different languages* on that account.)

> >On the same lines, Urdu script is
> >similar to the Arabic/Persian script and the Hindi script is
derived
> >from Sanskrit.     I remember learning that the two languages
developed
> >as more and more Muslim conquerors made their way to Central Asia.
They
> >needed a way to talk to each other so a mixture of two was born.
It
> >used to be called Hindustani.  I think the terms Urdu and Hindi
might
> >have existed in the pre-partition days but they weren't officially
used
> >until after Pakistan was created.   I suspect they maintained
separate
> >scripts because of religious reasons - as in neither party wanted
to
> >rewrite the religious texts in a new script.  Although I am sure
that is
> >only one tiny aspect of why a common script was never developed.
I've
> >noticed that when Hindi and Urdu differ it is usually because the
Hindi
> >word came from Sanskrit and the Urdu word from Arabic/Persion.

I'm not sure it has anything to do with rewriting religious texts
(except if
one regards *all* written texts as religious texts, and there are
religious
people who take that view). Rather, I think it has to do with the
traditional route to literacy in the cultures. Indian Muslims tended
to
learn to read and write first in the context of Koranic instruction,
in
other words reading the Quran in Arabic. Using the letters thus
acquired to
write and read their own language would be a secondary development.
And
Hindus would tend to learn to read Sanskrit first, and then naturally
use
the Devanagari alphabet to write their own tongue (which incidentally,
being
closely related to Sanskrit, is much better served by the Devanagari
alphabet than it is by the Arabic alphabet). And when they wrote,
their
target readers would be predominantly members of their own
religio-ethnic
group.

How all this compares to the Gitxsan / Nisgaa situation I'm not at all
sure.
Sorry to have gone on at such length. I'm tired and it's very snowy
out. ;-)

lilEnd

> >>Maybe someone would knows why we would talk about these very
closely
> >>related ways of speaking as "languages" and not "dialects."
> >
> >Because *downgrading* something to a dialect would most likely lead
to a
> >bloodbath.  And not upgrading a dialect to the status of a language
may
> >have the same effect.   Human beings are so stupid.
> >
> >Linda Fink wrote:
> >
> >>This came over my Chinook jargon list. Are Hindi and Urdu basically
the
>same??
> >>
> >>Date:    Mon, 22 Dec 2003 13:46:38 -0800
> >>From:    "Bruce, Colin" <Colin.Bruce at FRASERHEALTH.CA>
> >>Subject: Re: FN Language
> >>MIME-Version: 1.0
> >>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> >>
> >>I'd like to know how much closer.  Is it like the difference
between the
> >>Canadian and Australian Englishes.  I've been studying learning
Gitxsan
>and
> >>Nisgaa for a few years now and haven't found much more than a few
> >>differences in word choice and accent.  I concluded that people
chose to
> >>call them different languages for political reasons much like Urdu
and
> >>Hindi.  Maybe someone would knows why we would talk about these
very
>closely
> >>related ways of speaking as "languages" and not "dialects."
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> >

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