I speak Hindi. All my life I’ve been able to understand someone who spoke Urdu and they me. The vocabulary is different, but not to such a great extent that you can’t pick it up from context.
Now I am pretty sure that Urdu is a dialect of Arabic and Hindi is not a dialect, but a language descended from Sanskrit. Arabic and Hindi are not similar, and I can’t read written Urdu but I can read written Sanskrit even if I don’t understand 9 words out of 10.
So how can this be? How come these two languages are so similar spoken but become radically different when written? Where do they descend from? Does anyone know?
You are confusing alphabets with language origins. Many languages spoken by moslem populations use the Arabic alphabet, even though the ;anguages have no relation to Arabic. Persian, like Urdu, uses the Arabic alphabet. A noteable exception is Turkish, although it was written in that alphabet before the country switched to the Roman alphabet early in the 20th century.
Earl nailed this above. Here’s how I’d look at Arabic’s influence on Urdu – Arabic was to Urdu what French was to English.
Think of it this way – spoken language is “true”, living, and evolving language. Any writing system is window dressing, which can be foisted upon a given spoken language by more or less artificial means – by cultural exchange (Urdu), by conquest (Navajo, Quechua), and by fiat (Turkish).
Examples of related languages using different scripts – in a manner situationally similar to Urdu/Hindi – are Yiddish/German and Arabic/Maltese.
The best is Sebian/Croatian. Not even really different dialects, Orthodox Serbian uses a modified Cyrillic alphabet while Catholic Croatian uses Roman letters.
It’s very arbitrary. Lots of languages have switched from one writing system to another - Korean and Vietnamese used to be written with Chinese characters, while Korean uses an alphabet of its own invention now, and Vietnamese uses Roman letters. Romanian used to be written in Cyrillic letters, now it uses Roman. And there are various Jewish languages written with Hebrew characters - Yiddish (which is Germanic and fairly similar to German), Ladino or Djudeo-Espanyol (which is, obviously, descended from Spanish - and it preserves some interesting archaic aspects of it), Judeo-Italian (I think) and no doubt others.
So the writing system and the origin of the language are two separate things altogether. Urdu is the same language as Hindi, though it’s certainly got its own dialectual differences. On the other hand, different Chinese “dialects” are often completely incomprehensible to other Chinese, and as different (or more) than the Romance “languages”. Dialect versus language is arbitrary to a very great degree.
Hindi and Urdu are essentially the same language, derived (as Earl pointed out) from a merger (sometimes called “Hindustani”) of (1) Indo-Aryan vernacular descended from Sanskrit and (2) a dialect of Persian. Especially starting in the 19th century, Hindi speakers began to stress the language’s relationship to Sanskrit and to include more Sanskrit-derived vocabulary in the formal version of the language, while Urdu speakers did the same with Persian.
AFAIK the writing system never actually “switched”—from the beginning, Hindi, like other Indo-Aryan dialects of the time, was written in a variant of nagari (the alphabet of Sanskrit), while Urdu was written in nast’aliq (the script of Persian). So it was a single language, or later two very closely related languages, that were mutually intelligible to the two types of users in its spoken form but not in its written form. (Of course, many literate Hindi-speakers in the late second millennium could also write Urdu, and vice versa.)
bordelond:Here’s how I’d look at Arabic’s influence on Urdu – Arabic was to Urdu what French was to English.
Nitpick: I’d say rather that Arabic was to Persian what French was to English; Urdu just inherited most of its Arabized forms from Persian.
IIRC, Thackston’s introductory Persian textbook quotes somebody or other as saying “Greek and Persian are brother and sister, but Arabic and Persian are husband and wife”—very closely linked but not related by descent.
Elenia: You can learn to read Arabic script in a day or so. Discounting the fact tha vowels are not written, I think you’d find it quite easy to read Urdu.
John Mace, that sounds like a fascinating project, except wouldn’t I need someone to teach me the rules? There are unusual rules in Hindi, such as the placement of vowels.
Yeah, I was a little startled by John’s estimate of “a day or so” to learn Arabic/Persian script! It took me about two months of part-time self-study when I began learning Arabic fifteen years ago; maybe that’s particularly slow, or maybe John is just a script whiz. And I had already had a year of Hebrew, whose alphabet is closely related to that of Arabic—although the letters don’t look similar—in terms of writing direction, names of the letters, voweling, and so forth.
Elenia, if you do feel like working on Arabic script on your own, I recommend the textbook Elementary Modern Standard Arabic (EMSA), which includes a nice workbook for practicing your khatt.
Well, I do “collect” alphabets and have learned quite a few over the years. But I was talking about being able to read, which is a lot easier than writing. Given that the OP understands spoken Urdu, I bet that after sitting down with the Urud alphabet over a weekend, she’d be able to read it fairly well on Monday. It might take a few months before she publishes her first novel, witten in longhand.
nickholas, we ask that old threads in General Questions only be raised to contribute new factual information. Since this thread dates to 2004, I’m going to close it.
