Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
Brandy with Hot water, yes? :P On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 8:20 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian sur...@hserus.netwrote: Yes thank you. Brandy is always good to drink even when your nose isn't blocked --Original Message-- From: ss Sender: silklist-bounces+suresh=hserus@lists.hserus.net To: silklist@lists.hserus.net ReplyTo: silklist@lists.hserus.net Subject: Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please Sent: May 25, 2012 20:12 On Friday 25 May 2012 4:50:19 pm Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn Blocked nose? I know the feeling. Try a good shot of brandy. shiv -- srs (blackberry)
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On 24 May 2012 21:46, John Sundman j...@wetmachine.com wrote: Actually I don't know a single word in any Indian language -- excluding those that have been appropriated in to English -- other than, of course, Cherokee, Sioux, Apache, Wampanoag, Hopi, Navaho, Iroquois, etc -- so this whole thread is entirely fascinating, but in a totally abstract sense. jrs Moccasin? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moccasin Totem? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totem Kiran
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On 25-May-12 11:31 AM, Kiran K Karthikeyan wrote: Actually I don't know a single word in any Indian language -- excluding those that have been appropriated in to English -- other than, of course, Cherokee, Sioux, Apache, Wampanoag, Hopi, Navaho, Iroquois, etc -- so this whole thread is entirely fascinating, but in a totally abstract sense. jrs Moccasin? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moccasin Totem? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totem Suresh already pointed out that John said excluding those that have been appropriated in to English, but your parse error is rather deeper than that - he actually claims to KNOW words in Cherokee, Sioux, Apache, Wampanoag, Hopi, Navaho, Iroquois, etc - so your examples are erroneous. Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On 25 May 2012 02:09, Udhay Shankar N ud...@pobox.com wrote: Moccasin? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moccasin Totem? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totem Suresh already pointed out that John said excluding those that have been appropriated in to English, but your parse error is rather deeper than that - he actually claims to KNOW words in Cherokee, Sioux, Apache, Wampanoag, Hopi, Navaho, Iroquois, etc - so your examples are erroneous. Udhay Apologies. I read his examples as the ONLY category of words (i.e. proper nouns) appropriated into English. Kiran
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Udhay Shankar N ud...@pobox.com wrote: On 25-May-12 11:31 AM, Kiran K Karthikeyan wrote: Actually I don't know a single word in any Indian language -- excluding those that have been appropriated in to English -- other than, of course, Cherokee, Sioux, Apache, Wampanoag, Hopi, Navaho, Iroquois, etc -- so this whole thread is entirely fascinating, but in a totally abstract sense. jrs Moccasin? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moccasin Totem? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totem Suresh already pointed out that John said excluding those that have been appropriated in to English, but your parse error is rather deeper than that - he actually claims to KNOW words in Cherokee, Sioux, Apache, Wampanoag, Hopi, Navaho, Iroquois, etc - so your examples are erroneous. And from the context, he meant words from subcontinental languages that have been added to English like: - chit - bungalow - shampoo - teak and so on. -- b
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
I forgot to say, that from now on I propose to use this term (below). Thanks, Uhday! jrs On May 25, 2012, at 3:04 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: USAnian autochthones,
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
John Sundman [25/05/12 07:17 -0400]: I forgot to say, that from now on I propose to use this term (below). Thanks, Uhday! On May 25, 2012, at 3:04 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: USAnian autochthones, chthonic, of course. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
I've also heard the term First Peoples. (What, nobody else existed anywhere?) I believe the official Canadian term is First Nation. -- Sumant Srivathsan http://sumants.blogspot.com
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On Friday 25 May 2012 4:50:19 pm Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn Blocked nose? I know the feeling. Try a good shot of brandy. shiv
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
Shiv is always so helpful. Sent from my iPad On May 25, 2012, at 8:12 PM, ss cybers...@gmail.com wrote: On Friday 25 May 2012 4:50:19 pm Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn Blocked nose? I know the feeling. Try a good shot of brandy. shiv
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
Yes thank you. Brandy is always good to drink even when your nose isn't blocked --Original Message-- From: ss Sender: silklist-bounces+suresh=hserus@lists.hserus.net To: silklist@lists.hserus.net ReplyTo: silklist@lists.hserus.net Subject: Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please Sent: May 25, 2012 20:12 On Friday 25 May 2012 4:50:19 pm Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn Blocked nose? I know the feeling. Try a good shot of brandy. shiv -- srs (blackberry)
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
a linguist (whose name i conveniently cannot remember) said that both Hindi and Urdu are the same languages because the action words i.e. the verbs are the same. only the nouns and adjectives came from different sources as a result of waves of immigration/invasions. To complicate matters, Persian, from which many Urdu words derive, is also an Indo-European tongue. incestous languages and cultures abound... Radhika On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 10:22 PM, Deepak Shenoy deepakshe...@gmail.comwrote: (I have posted this before on Silk) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpagev=5Ud2rsMT5ng#t=202s The song is an old classic and can never sound so good in the new Hindi. In that vein, Gulaal has a very powerful song, Aarambh hai Prachand, which is very correct Hindi sounding but has many urdu words hai. Words like aarambh, prachand, dhanush, bhaav, daya, jis kavi ki kalpana mein etc are present but you have the urdu forms like zindagi, prem, jaan, jung etc. The song comes across as being very BJP hindi but it's not really - the song though builds a great picture. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jzl5uICMXY -- “Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream. ~ Lao Tzu (courtesy -Peacefrog) Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle. - STEVE JOBS
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 6:57 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian sur...@hserus.net wrote: And even a madras tamil type will say loude ka baal when he wants to insult someone, and crowd in to watch hindi movies, so I am not sure karunanidhi's efforts paid off too much Are you kidding me? I am with you that he didn't quite manage to wipe every last memory of Hindi out, but he went far with his silly ideas. He's more or less single handedly responsible for the ideology that led to the decimation of the TamBram society for example.
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
Srini RamaKrishnan [24/05/12 08:30 +0200]: On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 6:57 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian sur...@hserus.net wrote: And even a madras tamil type will say loude ka baal when he wants to insult someone, and crowd in to watch hindi movies, so I am not sure karunanidhi's efforts paid off too much Are you kidding me? I am with you that he didn't quite manage to wipe every last memory of Hindi out, but he went far with his silly ideas. He's more or less single handedly responsible for the ideology that led to the decimation of the TamBram society for example. Who said anything at all about tambrams swearing in gutter urdu? [me, I do that all the time but I also eat beef and drink..] This is your basic house painter, autowala etc type. More often than not with a dmk flag stuck on his cycle or auto.
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 7:30 AM, Srini RamaKrishnan che...@gmail.comwrote: Are you kidding me? I am with you that he didn't quite manage to wipe every last memory of Hindi out, but he went far with his silly ideas. He's more or less single handedly responsible for the ideology that led to the decimation of the TamBram society for example. Yes. But he is also responsible for a bit of diversity in India's linguistic landscape. There was (and still is) a serious attempt to force Language A down people's throats; homogenisation is WRONG in pretty much everything. C
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 9:48 AM, ss cybers...@gmail.com wrote: There are north Indian dialects that pass for Hindi such as Bhojpuri that were mixed with Persian with the Islamic invasions. This mix of Persian and Hindustani languages resulted in a hotch-potch called modern Hindi. I think Muslims spoke the same thing and merely called it Urdu. Perhaps there was more Persian in Urdu. Bollocks. Can't even bother reading the rest. The rest must be even more misinformed Hindu revisionist crap. :-)
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On Thursday 24 May 2012 11:54:36 am Radhika, Y. wrote: To complicate matters, Persian, from which many Urdu words derive, is also an Indo-European tongue. Persian had a pretty wide footprint as far as my reaidng goes. It was adopted in Afghanistan - from where Babur came in any case. It was the royal language in India while Urdu was a mix of local Indian languages and Persian spoken by the army. Some time under British rule Urdu replaced Persian as the official language in India. I recall reading somewhere that this caused great resentment among the Ashraf - the high caste Muslims who considered their language and customs superior to the Ajlaf low caste Muslim converts. It also later led to Hindu resentment as Hindi was the same but used the Devnagri script and the use of Urdu as official language was disputed. Ramachandra Guha writes that Hindi and Urdu were nearly the same except for the script and the fact that Muslims called it Urdu and Hindus, Hindi, and that Hindi+Urdu=Hindustani, the language of India. Gandhi and Nehru apparently wanted Hindustani to be India's national language so that it would please Hindus and Muslims and that both scripts could be retained. But clearly not all people in India were pleased with Hindi, let alone Hindustani. shiv
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On Thursday 24 May 2012 10:52:30 am Deepak Shenoy wrote: In that vein, Gulaal has a very powerful song, Aarambh hai Prachand, which is very correct Hindi sounding but has many urdu words hai. Words like aarambh, prachand, dhanush, bhaav, daya, jis kavi ki kalpana mein etc are present but you have the urdu forms like zindagi, prem, jaan, jung etc. The song comes across as being very BJP hindi but it's not really - the song though builds a great picture. Like I said earlier, pinning the sanskritization of Hindi on the BJP would basically mean only ignorance. The Sanskritization of Hindustani to create modern Hindi can be traced back to one Purushottam Das Tandon, a Congresswala who may have died before the BJP was born. Lots of things have changed and while people of my generation did feel that the old Hindi-Urdu was expressive, I don't think the new Hindi is necessarily any less expressive. Lots of commonly used words have been replaced by equally expressive Sanskrit origin words that are common across a slew of other Indian languages. Hawa- Pavan, Baarish-Varsha etc. Interestingly in Pakistan, Urdu is being Arabized and one classic instance is to replace the word Khuda with Allah. Khuda has origins in reactionary, Shia Persia and is hangover from Zoroastrianism. Hence Allah. shiv
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On May 24, 2012, at 10:20 AM, Mahesh Murthy wrote: Bollocks. Can't even bother reading the rest. The rest must be even more misinformed Hindu revisionist crap. That's what I say. Actually I don't know a single word in any Indian language -- excluding those that have been appropriated in to English -- other than, of course, Cherokee, Sioux, Apache, Wampanoag, Hopi, Navaho, Iroquois, etc -- so this whole thread is entirely fascinating, but in a totally abstract sense. jrs
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 7:16 AM, John Sundman j...@wetmachine.com wrote: Actually I don't know a single word in any Indian language -- excluding those that have been appropriated in to English -- other than, of course, Cherokee, Sioux, Apache, Wampanoag, Hopi, Navaho, Iroquois, etc -- so this whole thread is entirely fascinating, but in a totally abstract sense. Is it still common to use the term Indian for USAnian autochthones, or is Native American the preferred politically correct term these days? Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On Tuesday 22 May 2012 12:24:33 pm Mahesh Murthy wrote: Not that it will go far, regardlesss of the BJP's and VHP's idiotic attempts to push it along. It has already replaced the old Hindi. if you have a child studying in school in India check his Hindi textbook. It is ironic that a list populated by many TamBrams should have someone heap blame on the BJP scapegoat for replacing Urdu words in Hindi with Sanskrit words. It was in Tamil Nadu in 1953 that Karunanidhi restarted his anti-Hindi agitation. Hindi was the language of the North Indian Brahmins who as per the now discarded Aryan Invasion Theory invented by Western scholars, had driven the poor ickle Dravidians south , and Tamil Brahmins, the local Tamil Nadu subset of the Aryan North Indian subjugators of course were also targeted in Tamil Nadu by Karunanidhi's politics. There is so much nonsense built upon falsity in all this that the BJP and RSS are the whipping boys in a nation of confused, rootless and internally displaced people (such as Tam Brams) who haven't a clue about their own history but read it from books written by people who came and wrote if for them and told them You never recorded history - here we have recorded it for you. That too is actually nonsense. shiv
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
ss [24/05/12 09:48 +0530]: I am not at all sure how different the Hindi of the 1950s was from Urdu. Hindi movies in the 50s and 60s had titles in Hindi (Devnagri/Sanskrit script), Urdu (in a right to left script adapted from Persian) and English. the 1950s and 60s hindi was heavily flavored with urdu. The songs were by urdu shaayars.
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
ss [24/05/12 10:01 +0530]: It is ironic that a list populated by many TamBrams should have someone heap blame on the BJP scapegoat for replacing Urdu words in Hindi with Sanskrit words. I grew up in hyderabad studying hindi and speaking deccani urdu with my classmates regardless of their religion dammit. And even a madras tamil type will say loude ka baal when he wants to insult someone, and crowd in to watch hindi movies, so I am not sure karunanidhi's efforts paid off too much
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
(I have posted this before on Silk) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpagev=5Ud2rsMT5ng#t=202s The song is an old classic and can never sound so good in the new Hindi. In that vein, Gulaal has a very powerful song, Aarambh hai Prachand, which is very correct Hindi sounding but has many urdu words hai. Words like aarambh, prachand, dhanush, bhaav, daya, jis kavi ki kalpana mein etc are present but you have the urdu forms like zindagi, prem, jaan, jung etc. The song comes across as being very BJP hindi but it's not really - the song though builds a great picture. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jzl5uICMXY
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 9:29 AM, Thejaswi Udupa thejaswi.ud...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 9:24 AM, Chew Lin Kay chewlin@gmail.comwrote: Hello! So I was reading an essay about Indian food, when they mentioned the adoption of Sanskritized Hindi. Can someone explain what that is? I thought Hindi draws roots from Sanskrit, but this seems to be more complicated than that. Will offer thanks for now, and drinks when we find each other in the same neighbourhood. In brief, that phrase is used to separate it from Urdu. To be more accurate, it is to separate Hindi from Hindustani, which in itself is Hindi-mixed-with-Urdu. (Also, Mumbaiyya Hindi, the language of a lot of Bollywood, is a even more street-ified version of Hindustani.) Hindustani (written in Devnagari script, as opposed to Urdu's right-to-left script) is the lingua franca of large swathes of northern and south-central India. Sanskritized Hindi removes the common-manspeak Hindustani references from Hindi. Makes it pure so to speak. But pure what nobody knows, as Hindi itself is an amalgam derived from Sanskrit and other languages. Not that it will go far, regardlesss of the BJP's and VHP's idiotic attempts to push it along. My $0.02, Mahesh
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
I've always felt that Hindi is a relatively young concept as an independent language (not able to pin down an exact period in a few google searches yet). But I loved this line from the Wikipedia entry [1] Due to religious nationalism and communal tensions, speakers of both Hindi and Urdu frequently assert that they are distinct languages, despite the fact that native speakers generally cannot tell the colloquial languages apart How true is that? I can't tell them apart, but I'm very far from being the person to be asked. Dibyo [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Hindi
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 9:29 AM, Thejaswi Udupa thejaswi.ud...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 9:24 AM, Chew Lin Kay chewlin@gmail.comwrote: Hello! So I was reading an essay about Indian food, when they mentioned the adoption of Sanskritized Hindi. Can someone explain what that is? I thought Hindi draws roots from Sanskrit, but this seems to be more complicated than that. Will offer thanks for now, and drinks when we find each other in the same neighbourhood. In brief, that phrase is used to separate it from Urdu. To be more accurate, it is to separate Hindi from Hindustani, which in itself is Hindi-mixed-with-Urdu. (Also, Mumbaiyya Hindi, the language of a lot of Bollywood is a even more street-ified version of Hindustani.) Hindustani (written in Devnagari script, as opposed to Urdu's right-to-left script) is the lingua franca of large swathes of northern and south-central India. Sanskritized Hindi removes the common-manspeak Urdu or Hindustani references from Hindi. Makes it pure so to speak. Not that it will go far, regardlesss of the BJP's and VHP's idiotic attempts to push it along.
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
Dibyo [22/05/12 14:43 +0800]: How true is that? I can't tell them apart, but I'm very far from being the person to be asked. Well .. there are some words you can tell ARE from urdu nazar for sight ishq for love mubarak ho instead of badhaai ho for congratulations etc. Words from 50s and 60s hindi film music have a heavy urdu flavor for example.
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 7:04 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian sur...@hserus.net wrote: The hindi dialects in several places (cities such as hyderabad and lucknow) that have a largely mixed population are heavily urdu flavored compared to the hindi spoken in some other places, so there's a geographic / locational element as well. Urdu didn't evolve as a single language, Urdu is the language that came out of the later mixed blood Mughals in India who could no longer entirely or conveniently trace their tongue back to Persia or Turkey or thereabouts. The court affairs of the Mughal emperors till the last one, Bahadur Shah Zafar were conducted in Persian, and Ghalib, the famous poet refused to write couplets in Urdu initially, deeming it too lower class since he drew parental lineage from Genghis Khan and Tamur Lane (as did Babur, and every chest thumping Mughal - no one wants to be descended from any lesser source it seems). However he did indeed compose Urdu couplets since he also loved the language on merit, beautiful ones too, but when a friend from Lucknow urged him to recite them in Lucknow he refused on the grounds that Lucknowis will never understand the Urdu of the streets of Delhi.
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 12:39 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan che...@gmail.com wrote: class since he drew parental lineage from Genghis Khan and Tamur Lane (as did Babur, and every chest thumping Mughal - no one wants to be descended from any lesser source it seems). However he did indeed This is like every Syrian Christian family is either descended from original Brahmin families converted by St Thomas himself or from the Knanaya Jews led by Thomas of Cana to Kerala c. AD 800. -- b
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
Cheeni, you did read what I wrote about urdu originally evolving as a lingua franca for Mughal troops of various ethnicities (arab, turk, farsi, afghan, uzbek, tajik etc + various indian ethnic groups)? In fact it was originally called lashkari (army speech) for that reason .. Poetry in urdu is a bit late in evolving, as you point out - because most poets considered it street argot, whereas the courtly language was Persian and earlier, turki. -Original Message- From: silklist-bounces+suresh=hserus@lists.hserus.net [mailto:silklist- bounces+suresh=hserus@lists.hserus.net] On Behalf Of Srini RamaKrishnan Sent: 22 May 2012 12:40 To: silklist@lists.hserus.net Subject: Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 7:04 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian sur...@hserus.net wrote: The hindi dialects in several places (cities such as hyderabad and lucknow) that have a largely mixed population are heavily urdu flavored compared to the hindi spoken in some other places, so there's a geographic / locational element as well. Urdu didn't evolve as a single language, Urdu is the language that came out of the later mixed blood Mughals in India who could no longer entirely or conveniently trace their tongue back to Persia or Turkey or thereabouts. The court affairs of the Mughal emperors till the last one, Bahadur Shah Zafar were conducted in Persian, and Ghalib, the famous poet refused to write couplets in Urdu initially, deeming it too lower class since he drew parental lineage from Genghis Khan and Tamur Lane (as did Babur, and every chest thumping Mughal - no one wants to be descended from any lesser source it seems). However he did indeed compose Urdu couplets since he also loved the language on merit, beautiful ones too, but when a friend from Lucknow urged him to recite them in Lucknow he refused on the grounds that Lucknowis will never understand the Urdu of the streets of Delhi.
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 9:32 AM, Biju Chacko biju.cha...@gmail.com wrote: This is like every Syrian Christian family is either descended from original Brahmin families converted by St Thomas himself or from the Knanaya Jews led by Thomas of Cana to Kerala c. AD 800. Do the Muslims of Malabar also only descend from Cheraman Perumal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheraman_Perumal) and the few Arab traders who took him to see the Prophet?
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 4:35 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan che...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 9:32 AM, Biju Chacko biju.cha...@gmail.com wrote: This is like every Syrian Christian family is either descended from original Brahmin families converted by St Thomas himself or from the Knanaya Jews led by Thomas of Cana to Kerala c. AD 800. Do the Muslims of Malabar also only descend from Cheraman Perumal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheraman_Perumal) and the few Arab traders who took him to see the Prophet? Who better?
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
On 22-05-2012 09:24, Chew Lin Kay wrote: Hello! So I was reading an essay about Indian food, when they mentioned the adoption of Sanskritized Hindi. Can someone explain what that is? I thought Hindi draws roots from Sanskrit, but this seems to be more complicated than that. Will offer thanks for now, and drinks when we find each other in the same neighbourhood. Mahesh has already answered most of this elsewhere in the thread, but I'll throw in my own clarifications and personal anecdotes. Most of the languages of North India are derived from Sanskrit (I shall leave the tedious details of its influence on the vocabulary and grammar on present-day South Indian languages for later). Simplifying greatly, Sanskrit is an ancient language, which had a medieval offshoot called Khari Boli, which in turn evolved into Hindi and Hindustani - the difference being that Hindustani happily brought in large chunks of vocabulary taken from Urdu - which, as a bunch of people have pointed out, itself derives from Farsi, Turkic, and many other languages. Not being a linguist, philologist, or historian, I'm afraid I can't give detailed timelines of when this happened or if Hindi was always a hypothetical state of purity that Hindustani speakers aspired to or whether Khari Boli first became Hindi and then brought in Urdu vocabulary to become Hindustani. Things got interesting after Indian independence where for a combination of nationalistic, racial, and religious reasons (and it's difficult to draw the lines between them); Pakistan decided to make its national language Urdu and India decided to make its national language... well, nothing, because many people refused to accept a national language that they didn't speak themselves, but it adopted English and Hindi as the languages of the Central Government. This choice is grounded in the racial/ racist myths of Pakistan and India. The upper class Muslims who formed (and form?) the Pakistani elite have a racial myth that they are the descendants of Arabs and Persians, and not later converts to Islam. To emphasise that purity and connection to the original Muslims, it was necessary to purge Hindustani of Sanskrit vocabulary until only Urdu was left. A small correction on scripts: Urdu does not exactly use the Arabic script, but a number of right-to-left scripts derived from the Persian and Arabic ones. Again, I don't have personal experience or education to provide exact details, but these are easily available on Wikipedia. Across the border, the Brahmin(ical) elites wanted to emphasise Sanskrit, which meant purging Hindustani of Urdu vocabulary, so that the Hindi that was left had a vocabulary that drew from Sanskrit, even if this meant replacing widely used Urdu words with completely unfamiliar ones. Personal Anecdote #1: in Hindi lessons at school, my teacher would cut marks in tests for every Urdu word she found, on the grounds that we should be using pure Hindi instead. Now that I think about this, I'm not sure if this was Mrs Bharti Anand acting on her own behalf or whether this was actually prescribed by the Central Board of Secondary Education. Personal Anecdote #2: My grandfather was a native speaker of Punjabi, but at school learnt one of the Urdu scripts (I'm not sure which, neither are my parents) and the Roman script. So in his adult life he was a fluent speaker of Punjabi and Hindi, had tolerable Urdu, and not-very-confident English. However, because after Independence, political considerations meant that Urdu was frozen to a Persian-derived script, Hindi to the Devanagari script, and Punjabi to the Gurmukhi script, he could only read English and Urdu newspapers. Meanwhile, his wife, my grandmother, could speak only Punjabi fluently, and Hindi with less comfort, but she could read only Hindi texts. (Incidentally, in Pakistan, Punjabi is written in the Shahmukhi script, which is also a right-to-left script; Gurmukhi is a left-to-right script which is visually very similar to Devanagari but has a number of pitfalls for a Devanagari reader who's picking it up for the first time.) IMO, the attempt to purify Hindi's vocabulary into Sanskrit-origin words only has created a language that has lost some beautiful Urdu words and phrases, but retains none of the cleverness of its ancestor. I expect there are enough people on the list who will take exception to various parts of that opinion; I shall microwave my popcorn in anticipation of their reactions. -- Regards, Aadisht Mailing address for lists: li...@aadisht.net Personal mailing address: aadi...@aadisht.net Phone: 96000 23067
Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please
Chew Lin Kay [22/05/12 12:16 +0800]: In brief, that phrase is used to separate it from Urdu. Is there a linguistic/political/geographical/whatever reason why it's not just called Hindi or Urdu? religious urdu derived from languages such as arabic, farsi and turkish, and was a sort of lingua franca for the mughal armies that came to India, and included people of various islamic ethnicities (those as well as uzbeks, tajiqs, pashtuns etc), as well as people drawn from the local population. It is written in arabic script, but the words are, generally, widely used in colloquial forms of hindi. The hindi dialects in several places (cities such as hyderabad and lucknow) that have a largely mixed population are heavily urdu flavored compared to the hindi spoken in some other places, so there's a geographic / locational element as well. A hindu religious right winger or in some much rarer cases a linguistic purist will deliberately refrain from using urdu words when he speaks hindi, and consciously use synonyms for those words that have a sanskrit etymology Similarly, narendra modi makes it a point not to use any arabic / urdu derived words when he speaks gujrati, for much the same reason If you want a (probably fictitious) analogy closer to home, think of an umno / pas islamic + malay nationalist type who will deliberately avoid speaking any version of bahasa that has chinese or tamil words in it [though the very word bahasa is derived from bhasha, the hindi / sanskrit word for language..] srs
