On Tuesday 22 May 2012 9:24:00 am 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.
>
> Chew Lin
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.
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.
Over the past five decades there has been a move to purge Hindi of Urdu/Persian
words and replace them with Sanskrit words to the extent that modern Hindi has
a great deal of commonality with Sanskrit.
A lot of "Hindi" words I was taught at school are being replaced by Sanskrit
synonyms which are generally easy for non Hindi speaking Indians to understand
because other Indian languages already have those Sanskrit origin words.
For example "man" which was "aadmi" in the old Hindi becomes "purush". Woman
changes from "aurat" to "nari". "Joy" changes from the old Hindi/Urdu "khushi"
to "anand. The word for "week" changes from the old "haphta" to a more
Sanskritic "saptah". There are thousands of examples of course. But many of
the Sanskrit words are already used in many Indian languages and Hindi has
become more "familiar" to more Indians and less "foreign".
The downside is a that a whole culture of beautiful poetry in the old
Hindi/Urdu will die. A class ic case is the Youtube song linked below at the
exact spot where the singer extols this love's beauty in the old Hindi/Urdu
with the words below
The man says "hoton pe khelti hai tabassum ki bijliyan" ("On your lips play an
electric/electrifying smile") :)
"hoton" is Urdu for lips
"tabassum" is Urdu for smile
"bijli" is Urdu electricity/lightning. (The new Hindi word for electricity is
sanskrit vivdut shakti
(I have posted this before on Silk)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=5Ud2rsMT5ng#t=202s
The song is an old classic and can never sound so good in the new Hindi.
shiv
