From a song on the Bend it Like Beckham Soundtrack,
Since it’s from BiLB, I’m going to assume Hindi.
Is Hindi the language of a majority of Indians? If not, what is? And, how does one say “thank you” in Hindi (or the other language of the Indian majority)?
Looks to be Hindi. Lyrics and translation here.
“Girl, I’ve seen your presence this morning, today shall be a wonderful day.”
Actually the song is Punjabi,which is pretty similar to Hindi. Yes the majority of the Indian population speak hindi which also happens to be the national language.
The hindi version of “Thank You” is Shukriya. [Pronounced: shook re(as in regarding) ya]
I’ll never trust what a website says again. I am crushed by my error.
Thanks for the correction maleinblack.
I just hope that Xash doesn’t bop in here and ban me for spreading ignorance.
[hijack]It may be interesting to note that in Arabic (or at least some dialects thereof), “thank you” is pronounced Shukran. Almost certainly means one language borrowed from the other (I have no idea which, though)
[/hijack]
Dani
To continue the hijack …
Actually, what’s more likely is that they both have a common root, not one borrowed from the other. I think I have a language-development/ancestry chart at home which should have the answer to this, if no one drops in and answers it first.
Not the case - the languages aren’t related. Arabic is a member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family - near relatives include Hebrew (of course), ancient Egyptian, Aramaic, and the Ethiopic languages (Tigrinya, Amharic, etc.) More distant (and numerous) relations are various obscure languages in northern sub-Saharan Africa. Hindi, by contrast, is an Indo-European language, thus distantly related to English and from a completely different background.
Well, I would guess that the Turks had some influence on the Indian languages from about 1175-1340. Is the Turkish word for thank you similar to the Arabic? (I should probably know this one but my recall of the few things I was able to pick up in Turkish is horrible). If not then it is of course possible that the Muslims brought classic Arabic with them and some of it influenced the language.
Note, above is pure conjecture and not any solid fact.
Well, if you’re to trust the Wiki phrasebook, shukriya does indeed come from shukran.
Continuing the hijack, the -an on the end of shukran is a suffix, not part of the root word (shukr). Thus shukriya is closer to shukran than it looks, and is almost certainly derived from shukr.
It is misleading to say that the Turks conquered India - various central-Asian peoples speaking Arabic as a scholarly language, and perhaps Turkic dialects as a day-to-day language, did so. There were two big waves, in around 1200 and around 1500 (the Mughals). However, there had been contact with Muslims since the 700s.
The Turks speak a language from yet another completely unrelated family. So it shows the impact of borrowing between languages.
lambchops has nailed it: the two words are both from Arabic shukr meaning ‘gratitude’, but with different Arabic suffixes added. Hindi and Urdu (two names for the same language) have a huge number of Arabic and Persian loanwords. The Turkic rulers of North India in the Middle Ages (starting with the Ghaznavids in the 11th century, continuing to the Mughals in the 17th century), may have spoken Turkic dialects as their native tongues, but their court language and their language of high culture and administration was Persian. Hindi/Urdu picked up enormous amounts of Persian loanwords. Persian, in turn, already had huge numbers of Arabic loanwords before it was brought to India.
In Turkish as well as in Persian, they have borrowed the Arabic word for ‘giving thanks’ - tashakkur, from the same three-consonant root as shukr. But in modern Istanbul Turkish, they pronounce it a little differently and spell it tesekkür (the s has a little doohickey called a cedilla under it, to show that it’s pronounced sh).
In Sanskrit, Shukra is the name for the planet Venus, totally unrelated to the Arabic word.
I was just about to post a question here, but I see Jomo Mojo has already weighed in on the linguistic roots of shukriya.
Just another question though - I thought that, strictly speaking, shukriya was Urdu, and that dhanyavad was Hindi (both being understood to mean thank you). It’s also my impression that there were other word distinctions between Hindi and Urdu, with Urdu reflecting more strongly the Persian influence in the north, and that the choice to speak Urdu rather than Hindi tended to fall along religious lines. Is this not the case?
Makes sense since the family in the movie was Sikh.
Hindi and Urdu share exactly the same grammar and the same base vocabulary, and this common language is known as Hindustani or khaRi boli. The main thing that differentiates the two being the different alphabets they’re written in. The spoken language is essentially the same. The only other difference being choice of vocabulary.
For more learned or formal language, Urdu is more likely to borrow Persian loanwords (which includes a hefty dose of Arabic loanwords that came in with the Persian), while Hindi is more likely to borrow Sanskrit loanwords. In this case, shukriya is borrowed from Arabic, while dhanyavad is a rather self-conscious borrowing from Sanskrit. Hindi as we currently know it was only formed beginning in the 19th century, when communalist separatists began replacing the Persian vocabulary in Hindustani with Sanskrit loanwords. People were told things like, “don’t say shukriya, you’re a Hindu, you should be saying dhanyavad.”
The Hindustani language ordinarily spoken in an unpretentious way by the common people had a huge amount of Persian loanwords, and nobody thought much was amiss until the language reformers began to refashion Hindi by using Sanskrit to replace Persian. If you listen to the Bollywood film songs, most of them still use more Persian vocabulary than formal modern Hindi prose. The older style with more Persian in it is felt to be more poetic.
The philology of modern Indo-Aryan languages distinguishes between tadbhava words, which evolved organically from the earlier forms of the language, and tatsama words, which have been imported directly from classical Sanskrit. An analogy in French would be the word oeuf (egg) descended ultimately from Vulgar Latin as a tadbhava word, and albumen which is taken directly from classical Latin as a tatsama word.
What I’m saying is that basic Hindustani had no tadbhava word for ‘thank you’. The Sanskrit word dhanyavad was imported into modern Hindi as a tatsama. Might also note that in Asian countries they don’t have the habit of always saying “thank you” “thank you” “thank you” for everything, the way we Americans do. Hindustani speakers of earlier centuries might not have felt the need for a specific thank-you word, and when they did want to express heartfelt gratitude, they could have used other phrases like “You have been very kind.”
P.S. The word shukriya is still in common use by Hindi speakers. To quote R. S. MacGregor in Outline of Hindi Grammar, 3rd ed., page 44:
Ironically enough, because Xash is Indian, IIRC.
Nothing really to contribute here- the question has been pretty well answered.
maleinblack answers the OP. Jomo Mojo is the expert on all things Hindi. He knows way more than the average Indian does about the language.
According to the CIA World Fact Book:
Hindi is spoken more in the North than in the South. The South prefers English or the regional language. All major cities across the country have schools that use English as the primary language of education. Higher studies are almost exclusively in English.
My grasp over the Hindi language is probably less than 10% of my grasp over the English language.
There are many superficial similarities between Arabic and Hindi/Urdu, mainly many shared or similar words, such as shukria/shukran mentioned. This is due to centuries of contact and trading between the Middle East and Indian subcontinent. You can see why a word like “thank you” would be among those shared in a language needed for transactions etc.
Subcontinental people and Arabs here manage to communicate quite well in - as I understand it - a rough colloquial Arabic patois. Many Arabs pick up a bit of Hindi, and Hindi speakers certainly pick up more Arabic, more quickly than most western expats do. This is also due to the fact that most western expats are lazy, and they tend to mix with professional Arabs who all speak English.
istara, when I traveled in Saudi Arabia, I noticed that when people of many nationalities mingled, pidgin Urdu was used as a medium at least as much as pidgin Arabic. Whole neighboroods in cities like Jiddah are Urdu-speaking because of all the Indian and Pakistani gastarbeiter. The first person to show me how to read and write Arabic was a Hindu girl who had been raised in Kuwait. That was how my career as an Arabic linguist got started: A Hindu girl was my first Arabic teacher.
Look at the Hindustani dictionaries prepared in the 19th century by scholars like Platts and Fallon: The entries are alphabetized according to the Urdu script, and at the same time each entry is written in the Devanagari script too. This is the original unified language that comprehends both Hindi and Urdu. It has since been broken into two artificially separate entities by communal separatists, just as India itself has been artificially split into Bharat and Pakistan.
What we now call “Urdu” used to be known as Hindustani, although the definition of Hindustani also included what we now call Hindi. The name Urdu hadn’t been so commonly used, until the linguistic separatists seized upon it. For the history of this artificial split, see the book One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India by Christopher R. King (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1994). Both Hindus and Muslims may be taken to task for splitting up the unity of North Indian civilization. The civilization that built the Taj Mahal, formed the Hindustani sitar music popularized by Ravi Shankar, and gave the world so much enduring art, literature, and cuisine, was an amalgam of Muslim and Hindu contributions. The same goes for the Hindustani language. The Hindu language reformers in the 19th century, and the Muslim League political separatists of the 20th century, are both to blame for destroying this shared heritage. The sitar was invented by the Persian poet Amir Khusraw of Delhi, by combining Persian and Indian instrument design. Ravi Shankar’s music guru Allauddin Khan was a Muslim who paid homage to the Hindu deities. You just don’t find people like that anymore.
Back to the OP: Panjabi is so similar to Hindi, it can be easy to mistake one for another. Especially many Panjabi nouns are identical or nearly identical to Hindi nouns. For example, in the line quoted in the OP, the words tere ‘yours’, darshan ‘seeing, viewing’, âj ‘today’, din ‘day’ are exactly the same in both languages. It’s more in the verb forms that Hindi and Panjabi differ: for example, the present tense ending is -ta in Hindi but -da in Panjabi. The verb lag-, used to express feelings, is here conjugated lagûgâ in the Panjabi future tense; in Hindi the identical verbal root would be conjugated lagegâ.