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
