# Hindi-Urdu: Origin of the Division



## tonyspeed

I am curious to hear everyone's ideas on the the history of the Urdu/Hindi split? Do you think the Modern Standard Hindi represents the language as it should be? What do you have you read to have caused the split?


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## Qureshpor

tonyspeed said:


> I am curious to hear everyone's ideas on the the history of the Urdu/Hindi split? Do you think the Modern Standard Hindi represents the language as it should be? What do you have you read to have caused the split?



Tony, this is a very sensitive subject and almost any discussion on the subject ends up in acrimony. Here is a link to a talk given by a well known and internationally respected scholar Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. The talk is entitled, 

Urdu Literary Culture: The Syncretic Tradition
Keynote Address, Shibli Academy, Azamgarh
December 17, 2008

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00fwp/srf/srf_symcretism_2008.pdf

I think this should answer some of your queries if not all.


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## tonyspeed

QURESHPOR said:


> Tony, this is a very sensitive subject and almost any discussion on the subject ends up in acrimony.



I always find it funny how a historical subject that happened not so long ago (historical sources of information still extant) can be a source of contention. Thank you for your link.


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## Faylasoof

tonyspeed said:


> I always find it funny how a historical subject that happened not so long ago (historical sources of information still extant) can be a source of contention. Thank you for your link.



Unfortunately, the issue was politicised and remains so but we needn't go into it here. Below is quite a thorough treatment of the subject by Tara Chand. Though old (1944), it is still relevant.

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urduhindilinks/tarachand/tarachand.html


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## Qureshpor

QURESHPOR said:


> Tony, this is a very sensitive subject and almost any discussion on the subject ends up in acrimony. Here is a link to a talk given by a well known and internationally respected scholar Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. The talk is entitled,
> 
> Urdu Literary Culture: The Syncretic Tradition
> Keynote Address, Shibli Academy, Azamgarh
> December 17, 2008
> 
> http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00fwp/srf/srf_symcretism_2008.pdf
> 
> I think this should answer some of your queries if not all.



The links below to scholarly items would be a good start for those who have a  desire to find the facts behind  the Urdu-Hindi debate, from a historic linguistic perspective.

* One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India (Christopher.R.King, OUP 1994)

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/p...king/king.html

A short review of this book by Professor  Sushil Srivastava of Allahabad University, is also available. (This is only  12 pages long).

http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/10/28KingLanguage.pdf

Another short interesting piece is "Some notes on Hindi and Urdu" by the Late Ralph Russell of SOAS (6 pages)

http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/11/19somenotes.pdf


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## tonyspeed

I must say of all things that are most frustrating for a learner it is this "division" which is really not a real division but a mental division. You have X type of people that say words of Arabic and Persian content should never be uttered because that is not "correct" or "pure" Hindi. So I have had people in the past say: "don't say shukriya say dhyanyavad ". Then you have some that say "don't say intazaar say pratiksha". The sad part of the entire matter is that some of them don't even know "why" they are advocating such a strict division, they have just been taught that way! I suppose someone along the line in the teaching process SHOULD have known better but have chosen to follow the path of xenophobia. On top of that you have people telling you that one of the greatest tools by which to learn Hindi,  music and films, are NOT correct, and do not represent REAL Hindi. On top of that, we have no real semi-scientific data as to what types of words are ACTUALLY spoken in X location and Y location. Therefore, it is very easy to skew data and fictionalise it according to one's own viewpoint and ideological perspective or maybe base one's viewpoints only on one's immediate family or close circle of friends which usually share a similar history and ideological perspectives.

To me this is the greatest hindrance to Hindi ever becoming a respected international language. If I as an average student knew beforehand that Hindi was mired in such political-ideological-religious debates then the alternative of learning Chinese or Arabic suddenly seems more appealing. 

Even the origin itself is muddled in controversy and one cannot but assume that because of the issues involved, some have purposely tried to obscure the history behind this debate so that the truth cannot be accurately obtained. 

It almost seems that we need a indeed neutral researcher to analyse historical documents and determine what logically happened. This is why I tend to trust those who SHOULD be on the opposite side of the fence but argue the opposing side. For instance, I somewhat trust Alok Rai's "Hindi Nationalism" viewpoint because by virtue of his name (non Muslim )he should support division, BUT he does not. The problem I find with his short book is the level of English used is even too convoluted at times for me, someone who has read English my whole life.


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## Qureshpor

Tony, you make some very pertinent points. In a topic such as the Urdu-Hindi divide, an "outsider" to the "dispute" needs to have factual, accurate, and non-biased information. There are of course respected and time-honoured scholars on both sides of the divide. You have mentioned Alok Rai whilst Faylasoof SaaHib has provided a link to Dr.Tara Chand's book. I have mentioned Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. But if one still has doubts about the integrity of these individuals because of their linguistic and religious connections, then King, Russell and the like would be good scholarly sources to make a start. I have no idea about King's religious or language background but I do know for certain that Russell was an atheist.

Another point worth noting is that it serves no real purpose by referring someone to read Dr.Tara Chand or King's books. People need short and sharp answers. Unfortunately, if memebers of this group were providing this answer, there would bound to be accusations about impartiality or lack of there in. Also, it is much better to take on board the views of those who are in this field. This is the reason why I think that Professor Srivastava's review of King's book (12 pages) or Ralph Russell's notes (6 pages) might be a better starting point. Of course, I would recommend Faruqi's speech notes (11 pages) too.

I hope that whenever someone asks a question about Hindi/Urdu differences, we can signpost that person to this thread.  In an ideal world, one could have had a situation where one has a  language which draws on the genius of Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic (and a few European languages to a much smaller extent)  and spoken by practically the whole of the sub-continent.[By the way Tony, I can not assist you with Chinese but if you do decide to take up Arabic (or Persian, or Punjabi or Urdu or...), please do not hesitate to ask!]


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## greatbear

What we need, tonyspeed, is a good corpus, available online, primarily a good corpus of spoken language across the regions of this vast nation; that would indeed be a wonderful tool not merely for Hindi learners, but also for people like me, since whenever I travel in India (which I do a lot), it is the local language that interests me the most. Each community and region's local flavours, their varying drawls, idioms and choices of words, reveal such a lot to you: a bounty for the traveller.


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## greatbear

tonyspeed said:


> So I have had people in the past say: "don't say shukriya say dhyanyavad ". Then you have some that say "don't say intazaar say pratiksha". The sad part of the entire matter is that some of them don't even know "why" they are advocating such a strict division, they have just been taught that way! I suppose someone along the line in the teaching process SHOULD have known better but have chosen to follow the path of xenophobia. On top of that you have people telling you that one of the greatest tools by which to learn Hindi, music and films, are NOT correct, and do not represent REAL Hindi.



I think anyone who is prescribing something to you is wrong; the point rather, I would have thought, is to know which language register works where. There are communities and regions in India where shukriya is more common, and other regions where dhanyawaad is more common. As long as "intezaar" is understood (and spoken by most), why should you use "pratikshaa"? Besides that you will look like a phoney using that word, except some very limited contexts/settings and a few regions. If someone is prescribing something to you based on where does the word come from, then I would say don't follow that advice. Our objective should be communication intelligible in all its nuances, whether the word comes from Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Portuguese or English.


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## rahulbemba

Here is a learned article on the subject which sums up the origin and evolution of Urdu very well. 

Ameera Kamal is a research writer based in Islamabad. She holds a Masters degree in Anthropology from Quaid-e-Azam University, Pakistan.
*
Urdu - The Origin and History of the Language

By Ameera Kamal *

http://ezinearticles.com/?Urdu---The-Origin-and-History-of-the-Language&id=2181915 

I am writing a summary of the article, in my own words, but definitely taking facts from her article: 

The article stars with defining *the term “Urdu” – it derives from a Turkish word “ordu” meaning camp or army*. *Urdu developed amongst Muslim soldiers of the Mughals *(Mughal Empire was established by Muhammad Babur who invaded India (Hindustan) because of its riches and wealth).* Mughal armies belonged to various ethnicities, e.g. Turks, Arabs, Persians, Pathans, Balochis, Rajputs, Afghans, etc*. Present day Urdu evolved with the different dialects these soldiers used to communicate with each other. Because of this reason *Urdu is also called “Lashkari Zaban” or “language of the army”*.

 The author says that during its development Urdu language also assumed various names like “Urdu-e-Maullah” (the exalted army) and the term “Rekhta” (scattered (with Persian words)).

 The article says that the history of a language is definitely linked to the history of the people speaking it. *Urdu emerged as a “distinct language” after the year 1193 – the time of Muslims conquest. When the Muslims conquered these lands, they made Persian the official and “cultural language” of India. *Ameera Kamal writes: 
*
“as a result of the amalgamation of local dialects and the language of the invaders - which was either Persian, Arabic and Turkish, a new language evolved which later became Urdu.”*

In the later part, the article says that “with the coming of the British, new English words also became part of the Urdu language. Many English words were accepted in their real form while others were accepted after some modifications. Currently, the *Urdu vocabulary contains approximately 70% of Persian words* and the rest are a mixture of Arabic and Turkish words.”

Do read her full article. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/2181915


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## rahulbemba

greatbear said:


> There are communities and regions in India where shukriya is more common, and other regions where dhanyawaad is more common. As long as "intezaar" is understood (and spoken by most), why should you use "pratikshaa"? Besides that you will look like a phoney using that word, except some very limited contexts/settings and a few regions. If someone is prescribing something to you based on where does the word come from, then I would say don't follow that advice. Our objective should be communication intelligible in all its nuances, whether the word comes from Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Portuguese or English.



I agree with you very much on this...


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## tonyspeed

rahulbemba said:


> It is for this reason that *Urdu is also referred to as Lashkari Zaban or language of the army*.




The idea that Urdu refers to an army camp is highly disputed according to modern linguists/historians. Urdu according to some accounts refered to the city of Delhi itself. Notice Ghalib's words after the 1857 rebellion:

“     "My dear man, when Urdu Bazar is no more, where is Urdu? By God, Delhi is no more a city, but a camp, a cantonment. No Fort, no city, no bazaars, ..."

Another thing to remember that the first Turks (from which the word ordo originates) that came to India were not invaders. See Professor Mehr Afshan Farooqi's article "Urdu language of who's camp?".


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## rahulbemba

tonyspeed said:


> Urdu according to some accounts referred to the city of Delhi itself. Notice Ghalib's words after the 1857 rebellion:
> 
> “     "My dear man, when Urdu Bazar is no more, where is Urdu? By God, Delhi is no more a city, but a camp, a cantonment. No Fort, no city, no bazaars, ..."



Here, "Urdu Baazaar" may have been poetically used to denote Dilli/Delhi. But it doesn't comment anything about Urdu per se because Urdu language didn't originate in 1857 when this verse was written, but it was much earlier. So it appears that this argument is not valid. 



tonyspeed said:


> Another thing to remember that the first Turks (from which the word ordo originates) that came to India were not invaders.



Definitely we are not discussing entire history of India or the Islamic invasions. Let me know if you dispute this statement from the article: "*as a result of the amalgamation of local dialects and the language  of the invaders - which was either Persian, Arabic and Turkish, a new  language evolved which later became Urdu.*"


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## tonyspeed

rahulbemba said:


> Here, "Urdu Baazaar" may have been poetically used to denote Dilli/Delhi. But it doesn't comment anything about Urdu per se because Urdu language didn't originate in 1857 when this verse was written, but it was much earlier. So it appears that this argument is not valid.
> 
> 
> 
> Definitely we are not discussing entire history of India or the Islamic invasions. Let me know if you dispute this statement from the article: "*as a result of the amalgamation of local dialects and the language  of the invaders - which was either Persian, Arabic and Turkish, a new  language evolved which later became Urdu.*"




Once again, I suggest you read Language of Who's Camp?. I do dispute that statement. And I will do so again and again. The Idea that here we were peaceful Hindus and here come Mulsims who attacked us and changed our language is a very simplistic view of history, and a misguided one.


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## rahulbemba

tonyspeed said:


> I do dispute that statement. And I will do so again and again. The Idea that here we were peaceful Hindus and here come Mulsims who attacked us and changed our language is a very simplistic view of history, and a misguided one.



Now I can understand you  Since we can't discuss history on these forums, we should leave the readers to do their own research, and find neutral sources to read about India's history. 

I am also not surprised now why you took it as "Mulsims who attacked us and changed our language" for your own credit. It was written or meant NOWHERE by either me or the article. Suggest you doing a reflection on the word used, which was "evolved". I hope one day all of us will learn to live with the facts.


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## rahulbemba

Some more expert opinion on this issue for everyone's reference:

*"The birth of Urdu language was the direct result of the synthesis between the invading armies of Mahmud of Ghazni with the civilian population of the Indian cities. The word Urdu itself means Lashkar, derived from the Turkish language meaning armies."
*
The Essentials of Indian Culture by K.K.Khullar, Employment News, New Delhi, 21-27 Jan. 1995, p.1

*"Urdu was thus self-evidently the language of the soldiers of the armies of Mahmud-e-Ghazni, the only militarist sovereign of the era who maintained a large enough army for a considerable period to provide sufficient time for a new language to develop. It is for this same reason that the earliest surviving Urdu literature is that of Sufi saints who accompanied the Ghaznavids during their expeditions."*

Language of the armies, Urdu, by Dr. Samar Abbas, June 11, 2002 http://www.iranchamber.com/literature/articles/language_of_armies.php

*"The old Urdu was a mixture of Turkish, Persian and Arabic and was the language of the most powerful warrior tribes of Central Asia. These tribes would invade, conquer and occupy areas within easy reach for their wealth, gold, silver and precious stones. Wherever these tribes went, they took their language which had an amazing mingling and absorbing local words and proverbs.*"

A Brief History of Urdu; http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/other/guide/urdu/history.shtml

*"the impact of Islām created a new language, Urdu (from Persian: Camp), based on Hindi; Urdu was the lingua franca of the army. Urdu was used later for literature and at present is the mother tongue of most Indian Muslims and their brethren"*

Encyclopedia Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/556016/South-Asian-arts/65160/Literature#ref532147


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## Qureshpor

tonyspeed said:


> Once again, I suggest you read Language of Who's Camp?. I do dispute that statement. And I will do so again and again. The Idea that here we were peaceful Hindus and here come Mulsims who attacked us and changed our language is a very simplistic view of history, and a misguided one.




Tony SaaHib. Gratitude is due to you for the above link. This has led me to "Early Urdu Literary Culture and History" by the renowned Indian scholar of Urdu, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. This book was published in 2001 by OUP, Delhi. It takes into account the researches of other respectable scholars on this subject and is considered to be one of the most accurate, up to date pieces of research on this vexed topic.

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00fwp/srf/earlyurdu/srf_earlyurdu.html


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## tonyspeed

There is an excellent speech on the place of Urdu in Indian History by Javed Akhtar made at the 2011 Jaipur Literature Festival. I suggest watching it before it is lost to time.


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## Faylasoof

tonyspeed said:


> There is an excellent speech on the place of Urdu in Indian History by Javed Akhtar made at the 2011 Jaipur Literature Festival. I suggest watching it before it is lost to time.


 Thank you tonyspeed SaaHib for this! I agree with 98% of what Javed Akhtar said! The 2% I disagree with includes certain incorrect etymologies (like the word _hawaa_ [air] he says is Persian, in fact it is Arabic etc. etc.)and the assertion that Akbar _may have_ learn't Persian! Not only was his mother a full-blooded Persian, his family were Persianised Turks (Babur and Humayun both composed poetry in Persian) and during his time Persian became the official language and Raja Todar Mal played a key role in this when he is said to have issued an edict that all officials should learn this language. It is from this time that Persian influence on vernacular languages started to increase, esp. on local dialects around Delhi, like KhaRii Bolii. Also, I'm not sure if Akbar dressed in a _dhotii_, as Akhtar SaaHib seems to suggest, but he is right in saying that Akbar (or for that matter most of his courtiers) never spoke Urdu and that this impression is only from the Bollywood movie Mughal-e-Azam! The early Mughals spoke Persian in public and the Chughtai Turkic dialect amongst themselves. 

However, many of the points Javed Akhtar makes about Urdu are precisely what I made to fellow moderators soon after you opened this thread and a huge debate started here. But I needn't repeat them here. Beside, we've discussed quite a few things over the last few months already. So it is best to listen to what he has to say.


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## Qureshpor

Faylasoof said:


> Thank you tonyspeed SaaHib for this! I agree with 98% of what Javed Akhtar said! ... but he is right in saying that Akbar (or for that matter most of his courtiers) never spoke Urdu and that this impression is only from the Bollywood movie Mughal-e-Azam! The early Mughals spoke Persian in public and the Chughtai Turkic dialect amongst themselves. .



My percentage of agreement with Javed Akhtar is a lot lower than yours but this is not the place to discuss it. I will just say one thing. When Hollywood makes a film about Moses (The Ten Commandments), should we automatically assume that Moses spoke in English with an American accent? So, the fault is not with the film makers but with the people forming such impressions.


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## Faylasoof

QURESHPOR said:


> My percentage of agreement with Javed Akhtar is a lot lower than yours but this is not the place to discuss it. I will just say one thing. When Hollywood makes a film about Moses (The Ten Commandments), should we automatically assume that Moses spoke in English with an American accent? So, the fault is not with the film makers but with the people forming such impressions.


 I can see your point but I wish to be a bit more generous to him and his effort to try revive the language in the land of its birth. The main point was that Urdu is a native language and not a foreign import – a point many people seem to forget! For this reason alone his clarification that the Mughals never spoke Urdu, until much later, i.e. around the 19th century (by then KhaRii Bolii had completely replaced Braj as the literary language) is important. Of course we all know that the last Mughal ruler, Bahadur Shah Zafar, is a noted and respected Urdu poet.

All of us shall see this in a different light and let me hasten to add that there were many other points he made that I thought he could have done without. Like giving an example of Urdu from Radio Pakistan. That is _not _what you hear form there normally. He made it up! Also his ‘attack’ on Rais Amrohi – a bit of professional jealousy perhaps – was unwarranted! There were other points too on which I differ with him. Still, I would like to be generous because I think he is trying to do the impossible!


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## Qureshpor

Here is an article entitled "The Demise of Urdu in India" by Aviram Vijh. I don't know anything about his literary credentials and neither do I necessarily agree with everything he is saying (and no doubt others may also have their differences with him too) but it still makes interesting and informative reading. He is an Urdu speaker from Hindu-Punjabi background. 

http://aviramsworld.com/2011/02/23/the-demise-of-urdu-in-india/


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## tonyspeed

I made this statement in another thread : "There is no borrowing here. Hindustani is the mother of both Modern Hindi and Modern Urdu. Hindustani never went anywhere. It still exists in India. So it is not possible for Hindi to borrow from Urdu. They inherited the word from the same mother. "  

To which QP responded: "I disagree about "Hindustani" being the mother of both Urdu and modern day Hindi"

QP-saahib, Please explain your reasoning if you don't mind.


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## marrish

tonyspeed said:


> I made this statement in another thread : "There is no borrowing here. Hindustani is the mother of both Modern Hindi and Modern Urdu. Hindustani never went anywhere. It still exists in India. So it is not possible for Hindi to borrow from Urdu. They inherited the word from the same mother. "
> 
> To which QP responded: "I disagree about "Hindustani" being the mother of both Urdu and modern day Hindi"
> 
> QP-saahib, Please explain your reasoning if you don't mind.


Thank you for shifting this discussion to the place where it belongs.


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## Qureshpor

tonyspeed said:


> I made this statement in another thread : "There is no borrowing here. Hindustani is the mother of both Modern Hindi and Modern Urdu. Hindustani never went anywhere. It still exists in India. So it is not possible for Hindi to borrow from Urdu. They inherited the word from the same mother. "
> 
> To which QP responded: "I disagree about "Hindustani" being the mother of both Urdu and modern day Hindi"
> 
> QP-saahib, Please explain your reasoning if you don't mind.



Tony SaaHib, we have covered this ground before so I shall be as brief as possible with the hope that the discussion stops here.

As you and other members of the forum know, the language that finally became to be known as Urdu was referred to by various names by its speakers over a period of centuries. These range from (not necessarily in chronological order) Hindii*/Hindvii/ Rextah, Urdu-i-Mu3allaa and others. It is not unknown for speakers of this language to have used the word "Hindustani" but it was primarily the British who promoted this word as "Hindustaan" was the name they became accustomed to for the country. Just type in Hindustani Grammar (or other spelling variants) and you will come across at least a dozen if not more of such books written by British authors. Most of these are available on the net. Anyone flicking through the pages will very soon come to realise that the language being described is nothing but Urdu.

Again, it is a well known fact to which all the scholars of repute are in agreement that both Urdu and Modern Hindi (having its beginnings at Fort William College) owe their basis to the dialect known as KhaRii-Bolii. If any language is the "mother" of both Urdu and Hindi, then surely KhaRii-Bollii must be given this distinction.

It is true that at one stage "Hindustani" was seen by some well meaning people as a "middle ground" for Urdu and Hindi and was promoted to be the national language of India but the motion was defeated by one vote in the Indian parliament.

I hope I have made my position clear.

* Hindi for Urdu has been used as late as 1915 by Allamah Muhammad Iqbal in his Persian work "Asraar-i-Khudii" (Secrets of the Self). Please see the thread below.

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1799656&highlight=3uzuubat


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## greatbear

If Hindustani is/was "nothing but Urdu", could you please clarify, QP, how was it seen as middle ground between Hindi and Urdu, rather than Urdu? Or was that Hindustani different from the Hindustani of the British authors?


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## marrish

My personal impression is that ''Hindustani'' was indeed nothing but Urdu, but only its low and middle register. In this form it was considered as a middle way between Hindi and High Urdu.


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## greatbear

marrish said:


> My personal impression is that ''Hindustani'' was indeed nothing but Urdu, but only its low and middle register. In this form it was considered as a middle way between Hindi and High Urdu.



This is also my personal impression, but I await QP's clarification. I have a pointed question to ask, meanwhile, inspired from another ongoing thread: would the word "anubhav" (experience) be a Hindustani word or not? I think once we agree on what is this animal called Hindustani, it would help some of us a lot over where we're going.


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## tonyspeed

marrish said:


> My personal impression is that ''Hindustani'' was indeed nothing but Urdu, but only its low and middle register. In this form it was considered as a middle way between Hindi and High Urdu.



To me, this makes more sense. We cannot possibly claim that Urdu did NOT change at all in response to the divisive political struggles of the 1800s and 1900s and after Partition, can we? Maybe you, QP-ji can provide more evidence of this than I can, but it would seem to me that in older "Urdu" works there was more freeness in vocabulary choice and there were less omissions of words of Sanskrit and Prakrit origins. Not to say that words of such origin words do not exist in Urdu still, but, in the past, there seemed to have been more. (One such example we discussed recently is people, not you, claiming that baRhiyaa is not used in good Urdu - Where do these ideas come from? Where does a preference for Umda come from? I cannot see such an attitude existing before the Persian-script/Devanagari struggles of pre-Partition Hindustan) Such an Urdu was a product of times when both Muslims and Hindus celebrated each other's festivals in India - lack of division and linguistic cross-polination.  

Maybe, while the name is the same, we need to make a distinction here between "Ordu", the language of the market - the common link language that existed before all of the political debates and Mordern Urdu, which is different - a modern language with polical backing.   This is not to say that there were not those flooding thier poetry with Persian during the times of Ordu, but that was poetic license and was not the language of the lay-Ordu speaker.   

So when we say Urdu and Standard Hindi, we are speaking of an upper-register with political backing that has undergone great changes in modern times (even though these changes don't seem to be limited to the upper-register at all).


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## Faylasoof

tonyspeed said:


> To me, this makes more sense. We cannot possibly claim that Urdu did NOT change at all in response to the divisive political struggles of the 1800s and 1900s and after Partition, can we? Maybe you, QP-ji can provide more evidence of this than I can, but it would seem to me that in older "Urdu" works there was more freeness in vocabulary choice and there were less omissions of words of Sanskrit and Prakrit origins. Not to say that words of such origin words do not exist in Urdu still, but, in the past, there seemed to have been more. (One such example we discussed recently is people, not you, claiming that baRhiyaa is not used in good Urdu - Where do these ideas come from? Where does a preference for Umda come from? I cannot see such an attitude existing before the Persian-script/Devanagari struggles of pre-Partition Hindustan) Such an Urdu was a product of times when both Muslims and Hindus celebrated each other's festivals in India - lack of division and linguistic cross-polination.
> 
> Maybe, while the name is the same, we need to make a distinction here between "Ordu", the language of the market - the common link language that existed before all of the political debates and Mordern Urdu, which is different - a modern language with polical backing. This is not to say that there were not those flooding thier poetry with Persian during the times of Ordu, but that was poetic license and was not the language of the lay-Ordu speaker.
> 
> So when we say Urdu and Standard Hindi, we are speaking of an upper-register with political backing that has undergone great changes in modern times (even though these changes don't seem to be limited to the upper-register at all).


 Firstly, allow me to clarify this point since it was I who said something about the absence of use of _baRhhiyaa_ in our speech! This is a fact! In our Urdu speech we don’t use this word which doesn’t mean that we don’t consider it part of the Urdu vocabulary. In fact it is quite the opposite! Perhaps you may care to re-read my posts in that thread then you’ll know what I actually said. Incidentally, this has nothing to do with the topic at hand since the word _baRhiyaa_ is used by some Urduphones but not by others! 

As for Hindustani being middle register Urdu, this is a point that has been made endless number of times in this forum! One can search the forum with this term and see what one gets. BTW, how one defines middle register can at times be tricky since our spoken language at least includes shifting registers and a whole spectrum of words and idioms depending where we are from, what we happen to be discussing and which time period we are talking about. 

The British used the term Hindustani to mean that form of Urdu which had become the lingua franca of much of northern and north-western regions (as well as Hyderabad Deccan) of the then united India. As has been mentioned often enough, they also wrote grammars of “Hindustani or Urdu language”. This is how they titled several of their works. We are talking about what was once the daily, everyday speech of our forebears and a significant part of which is still our everyday speech though changes have occurred over the last sixty odd years for obvious reasons. 

I beg to differ that Modern Urdu is a term referring to a language that has political backing since 20th century Urdu of pre-partition India also comes under this term. There are also several examples of late 19th century Urdu works written in the “modern style”, i.e. free of archaic expressions and idioms, so are in Modern Urdu. 

The Oxford India Anthology of Modern Urdu Literature (in 2 volumes) by Mehr Afshan Farooqi, Professor of South Asian Literature at the University of Virginia, includes works by Hadi Rusva (d.1931), Premchand, Krishan Chander, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Intizar Husain, Qurratulain Hyder, Naiyer Masud, Syed Muhammad Ashraf etc. etc. All these and many others, like Manto (_manTuu_) and Diwan Singh Maftoon, wrote in Modern Urdu. Just do a Google search for Diwan Singh Maftoon and you'll come across his _unforgettable_ work in journalism using Modern Urdu, aptly called _naa qaabil-e-faraamosh_! None of them were following any political agenda. They just wrote in Urdu, and to be precise Modern Urdu.

[Regrettably, the title of Maftoon's work in its transliterated form as it appears on the net is misspelt (as “Naqabl -e- Faramosh”) but hat has nothing to do with the author.]


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## Faylasoof

greatbear said:


> This is also my personal impression, but I await QP's clarification. I have a pointed question to ask, meanwhile, inspired from another ongoing thread: would the word "anubhav" (experience) be a Hindustani word or not? I think once we agree on what is this animal called Hindustani, it would help some of us a lot over where we're going.


  I guess it may depend on one’s criteria. So if we were to look up this word (انبهو अनुभव _anu-bhav_ ) in dictionaries that go under the name of “Hindustani Dictionary” (for example Shakespear’s and Fallon’s) and find it one but not the other. What should we conclude? Platts mentions it but then one can say that defines itself as a dictionary of Urdu and Classical Hindi. 

(Incidentally, Fallon has it misspelt in Urdu as انیهوinstead of Platts’ correct انبهو for _anu-bhav_!)


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## greatbear

However, whether "anubhav" can be accepted in Hindustani or not is integral to the argument here. If it is Hindustani, then Hindustani is certainly different from Urdu, or at least modern Urdu: since one Urdu speaker here has recently even thought "anubhav" as Sanskritized Hindi! If it is not Hindustani, then the point that Hindustani was the lingua franca of any Indian region is itself in question, since "anubhav" is not some Government of India-introduced word, but a word that has been used over centuries by both literate and illiterate people all over India, especially northern India.

Meanwhile, I will beg to differ from what you wrote in post 30: Deccan Urdu is very different from the Urdu used in north and north-west India, especially in terms of pronunciation but also in matters of word choices and lexicon. Both forms of Urdu cannot be one "lingua franca".


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## Qureshpor

greatbear said:


> If Hindustani is/was "nothing but Urdu", could you please clarify, QP, how was it seen as middle ground between Hindi and Urdu, rather than Urdu? Or was that Hindustani different from the Hindustani of the British authors?



The implication, I presume, is that perhaps it is n't/was n't.

Here is a link to John Borthwick gilchrist's book entitled "A Grammar of the Hindoostanee  Language" published in 1796. Just browse through it at your leisure and draw your own conclusion concerning the language being described. The front cover of the book alone with two couplets from the Urdu poet Mirza Muhammad Rafi (Rafii3) Saudaa (1713-1781) would give a very strong hint about the language under discussion.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...ei=qfF8SffwPILeyASd7bCoCQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

John Borthwick Gilchrist (1759-1848) is the earliest personality responsible for promoting the use of the word "Hindoostanee" for Urdu. Please take a look at a short piece (a page long) on his biographical and literary background.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...epage&q=the orient Linguist gilchrist&f=false

If you know anyone who is a Hindi speaker and is also familiar with the Urdu script, ask him/her to look at this and/or other "Hindoostane" grammar books by William Carmichael Smyth, Dowson, shakespeare, Yates, Ballantyne, Forbes, Platts, Lyall, Small, Ranking, Palmer, Phillott and others. Dowson's grammar is entitled, "A Grammar of the Urdu or Hindustani Language". This was first published in 1872 and its third edition came out in 1908. Platts' grammar (1874) is entitled "A grammar of the Hindustani or Urdu Language. Small gives the title to his grammar (1895) as "A Grammar of the Urdu or Hindustani Language".

In all these books, you will find quotes from Urdu master poets as well as prose classics such as "Khirad-Afroz" (Hafeez-ud-Deen Ahmad-1867), "Aaraa'ish-i-maHfil"-(Syed Haidar BaKhsh Haidari-1802), "BaaGh-o-Bahaar" (Miir Aman 1804?) and others. Returning to Gilchrist's grammar, chapter IX is devoted to prosody. This is what he has to say (see it for your self on page 261 in the link provided)..

The poetical measures of the Hindoostanee , have one common source with the Persian, namely the Arabic; and as no Author that I recollect has professedly written on the application of its metrical rules to the Language we are now treating of, I shall endeavour to handle this subject as far as it relates to the Rekhtu* with all possible conciseness and perspicuity; producing at the same time with suitable observations on their nature and formation, a few specimens from the various sorts of verse used by the best Poets who have composed their several works in that mixed Dialect, also called OOrdoo or the polished language of the Court, and which even at this day pervades with more or less purity the vast provinces of a once powerful empire.

Dowson, in the preface to his grammar writes..

Urdu or Hindustani Grammar has been developed and reduced to a system by Englishmen, or under their supervision. From Gilchrist to Shakespeare, and from Shakespeare to Yates, Arnot, and Forbes, each new Grammar has thrown new light upon the language and has lightened the labour of learning it.

I hope I have provided sufficient proof that the term Hindustani stands for Urdu.

There were level headed people who did not wish Urdu and Modern Hindi (from the early 19th Century) to go their separate ways, always at loggerheads with each other. Supporters from both camps had become polarised and entrenched in their respective positions. People who proposed Hindustani as the middle ground for a future national language of India did not have at hand works of prose and verse in Hindustani to illustrate its middle ground but they had a vision (perhaps a naive one) that such a language could be forged for the sake of national unity. Mahatama Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were strong supporters of this idea. The vexed question of the script still remained and frankly I don't know how it would have been solved even if the motion had been carried in parliament.

If a neutral person were to look at all the samples of Hindustani (Urdu) that are given in all these books, he/she would conclude that the language of that time is no simpler than the Urdu of today. In fact, most Urdu lovers would wish they could emulate that language. 

* This is a typo for "Rekhta/Rexta" (another name for Urdu)


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## Qureshpor

marrish said:


> My personal impression is that ''Hindustani'' was indeed nothing but Urdu, but only its low and middle register. In this form it was considered as a middle way between Hindi and High Urdu.



I hope my post covering "Hindustani" clarifies the point that the "register" aspect was a much later development. I should also add that "Hindustani", apart from the language has of course other implications too.

juutaa Jaapaanii/dil Hindustani/Raja Hindustani (Indian)

Hindustani Music (North Indian Classical Music as opposed to South Indian Classical Music)


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## Qureshpor

tonyspeed said:


> To me, this makes more sense. We cannot possibly claim that Urdu did NOT change at all in response to the divisive political struggles of the 1800s and 1900s and after Partition, can we? Maybe you, QP-ji can provide more evidence of this than I can, but it would seem to me that in older "Urdu" works there was more freeness in vocabulary choice and there were less omissions of words of Sanskrit and Prakrit origins. Not to say that words of such origin words do not exist in Urdu still, but, in the past, there seemed to have been more.
> 
> Maybe, while the name is the same, we need to make a distinction here between "Ordu", the language of the market - the common link language that existed before all of the political debates and Mordern Urdu, which is different - a modern language with polical backing.   This is not to say that there were not those flooding thier poetry with Persian during the times of Ordu, but that was poetic license and was not the language of the lay-Ordu speaker.
> 
> So when we say Urdu and Standard Hindi, we are speaking of an upper-register with political backing that has undergone great changes in modern times (even though these changes don't seem to be limited to the upper-register at all).



In addition to what I have said in reply to gb's queries, a couple of points need to be made.

If you look at Urdu literature from the earliest times to the age of Mir, Sauda, Dard, to writers of Hyderabad and Mysore States, to Lucknow School of Urdu Poetry, to  Nazeer Akbarabadi and to more modern times up to and even post partition there has not been any deliberate exclusion of "Hindi" words. I am placing Hindi in quotation marks because the vast majority of these words are a shared asset of both languages. Some poets like Nazeer Akbarabadi, Meeraji, Akhtar Sherani and others included possibly a higher percentage of such words in their works than others. I wish you could read Urdu. If you could I would have sent you a treasure trove of Urdu poetry and then the questions you are asking would not have crossed your mind. Mind you, these Urdu writers (of verse and prose) were from a diverse geographical and religious backgrounds. Iqbal died in 1938. Read his "nayaa shivaalah" and you will see what I mean.

What Urdu prose and poetry does not have or perhaps very little is the direct Sanskrit borrowings. For example, Urdu would have "raat" but not "raatri", "des" and not "desh" etc. One further point. The older generation had lived in a diverse environment and their works would reflect the ethno-religious mix. But the new generation have not grown up in that environment, so the chances of a Pakistani Urdu writer's choice of words may be somewhat different (perhaps) than his counterparts in India. Even so, one only needs to read "Ibn-i-Insha"'s poetry (died in 1978) and my words would appear contradictory. Listen to "Insha Jii uTho" on Youtube.

I have heard people say that Radio Pakistan's Urdu or Pakistan TV's Urdu is unintelligible. I find this difficult to believe! It is no where "difficult" as some of Ghalib's poetry or even Iqbal's for that matter. Poets and prose writers write according to the situation. If a poet is talking to God (as Iqbal is doing in "shikvah") he is not likely to use "low" register, is he? This is how he begins the poem..

kyuuN ziyaaN-kaar banuuN suud-faraamosh rahuuN 
fikr-i-fardaa nah karuuN maHv-i-Gham-i-dosh rahuuN 
naale bulbul ke sunuuN aur hamah-tan gosh rahuuN 
ham-navaa maiN bhii ko'ii gul huuN kih xaamosh rahuuN 
jur'at-aamoz mirii taab-i-suxan hai mujh ko 
shikvah Allah se "xaakam ba-dahan" hai mujh ko 

Similarly, a love poem by Miraji (see the link below- kalark kaa naGhmah) does not need to "philosophise" to any great depth.

https://groups.google.com/group/alt...6f00b36?lnk=gst&q=kalark+kaa#572e3db426f00b36

Finally, here is a line from Iqbal.

shaktii bhii shaantii bhii bhagtoN ke giit meN hai 
dhartii ke baasiyoN kii muktii priit meN hai


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## marrish

greatbear said:


> ...since one Urdu speaker here has recently even thought "anubhav" as Sanskritized Hindi!


I didn't think like this. The fact is that I asked the question "What is the equivalent in Sanskritized Hindi?'' (thread: experience) upon which you proposed _anubhav_, hastening to add that it is not Sanskritized Hindi, which I in turn accepted. This only for clarification.


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## greatbear

marrish said:


> I didn't think like this. The fact is that I asked the question "What is the equivalent in Sanskritized Hindi?'' (thread: experience) upon which you proposed _anubhav_, hastening to add that it is not Sanskritized Hindi, which I in turn accepted. This only for clarification.



My point was based on post no. 12, written by you here, wherein you persist in calling your stance of Sanskritized Hindi as applied to "anubhav" as a pleonasm. I did offer a rebuttal in post no. 14 of the same thread, and maybe you have other thoughts now.

By the way, none of the Urdu speakers has answered a very pertinent question so far that has a very direct bearing on the discussion: will you consider "anubhav" Hindustani or not?

@QP: You have once again succeeded in writing several lines without saying one thing or the other. Is Hindustani = Urdu? If yes, which you seem to be implying, then how are you claiming it, once again, that to be a neutral ground between Hindi and Urdu? In other words, you are claiming Urdu to be the neutral ground between Urdu and Hindi? Wow!


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## Qureshpor

greatbear said:


> My point was based on post no. 12, written by you here, wherein you persist in calling your stance of Sanskritized Hindi as applied to "anubhav" as a pleonasm. I did offer a rebuttal in post no. 14 of the same thread, and maybe you have other thoughts now.
> 
> By the way, none of the Urdu speakers has answered a very pertinent question so far that has a very direct bearing on the discussion: will you consider "anubhav" Hindustani or not?
> 
> @QP: You have once again succeeded in writing several lines without saying one thing or the other. Is Hindustani = Urdu? If yes, which you seem to be implying, then how are you claiming it, once again, that to be a neutral ground between Hindi and Urdu? In other words, you are claiming Urdu to be the neutral ground between Urdu and Hindi? Wow!



It appears you have not understood my post which I believe is very clear for anyone to follow. In order to avoid any direct dialogue, I shall take the precaution of not responding to any of your posts in the future.


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## marrish

greatbear said:


> By the way, none of the Urdu speakers has answered a very pertinent question so far that has a very direct bearing on the discussion: will you consider "anubhav" Hindustani or not?


Possibly my grandfather could have answered this question; I've never heard any Hindustani myself (even on site of the Linguistic Survey of India).

I don't think there is any space for further exchange for all the points have been repeated in nauseating number of cases; to put it simply: the term ''Hindustani'' for the language has evolved over the time, especially before the Partition, as proposed by its supporters. I wouldn't consider _anubhav_ Hindustani.


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## greatbear

QURESHPOR said:


> It appears you have not understood my post which I believe is very clear for anyone to follow. In order to avoid any direct dialogue, I shall take the precaution of not responding to any of your posts in the future.



Yes, the ambiguity in your post is quite clear for anyone to follow. I am expecting simple answers instead of rhetoric - why don't you provide them?

I do not understand your last comment. You do not wish your opinions to be called forth in question? What kind of argument is that? As you said, it appears that I did not understand your post. Ok, possible. Why do you not give direct answers to my questions?

@marrish - If 'anubhav' isn't Hindustani, then Hindustani doesn't seem to me lingua franca, too, of India or even of northern India.


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## tonyspeed

QURESHPOR said:


> What Urdu prose and poetry does not have or perhaps very little is the direct Sanskrit borrowings.



This depends on what you call Urdu prose. Popular Braj Bhasha  devotioanal poetry spanning a time period from the 14th to the 18th  centuries contains
many Sanskrit borrowings. Even the Hindi dictionary  compiled by Mirza Khan  contains Sanskrit loan words

"The  concentration of Sanskrit and Sanskritic loanwords found in Mirza  Khan's dictionary suggest how much of the text is a product of bipartite  culture" - Literary Cultures in History: Reconstruction from South Asia

So it is possible that the Urdu you are reading was written by those primarily familiar with the Persian Language.

Hindi was a conglomeration of languages and styles in a state of flux up until fairly recent times. 
How do we express big words? The choice has always been between Persian and Sanskrit, with Persian having a
political edge over Sanskrit.


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## Qureshpor

tonyspeed said:


> This depends on what you call Urdu prose. Popular Braj Bhasha  devotioanal poetry spanning a time period from the 14th to the 18th  centuries contains
> many Sanskrit borrowings. Even the Hindi dictionary  compiled by Mirza Khan (only the second such dictionary ever compiled)  contains Sanskrit loan words
> 
> "The  concentration of Sanskrit and Sanskritic loanwords found in Mirza  Khan's dictionary suggest how much of the text is a product of bipartite  culture" - Literary Cultures in History: Reconstruction from South Asia
> 
> So it is possible that the Urdu you are reading was written by those primarily familiar with the Persian Language.
> 
> Hindi was a conglomeration of languages and styles in a state of flux up until fairly recent times.
> How do we express big words? The choice has always been between Persian and Sanskrit, with Persian have a
> political edge over Sanskrit.



Only a scholar can give you definitive answers to your questions. No doubt there will be words in Urdu that are Sanskrit. But, my understanding is that the bread and butter of Urdu vocabulary is the Prakrit KhaRii-Bolii in which raatri became raat. So, whatever final shape the words took is how they are in Urdu. I don't think people sat down and made a conscious effort in making a decision that we will have "intizaar" in our vocabulary and will leave out "pratiiksha". It just happened. 

I have n't read any Braj Bhasha (unless you count the odd piece from Amir Khusrau) and the type of Urdu authors that I have read are, as far as I know, no different from the next person's reading list. I have n't really given any thought to whether they knew Sanskrit, Arabic or Persian although having said that a number of Urdu top guns were familiar with Sanskrit.


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## Faylasoof

greatbear said:


> However, whether "anubhav" can be accepted in Hindustani or not is integral to the argument here. If it is Hindustani, then Hindustani is certainly different from Urdu, or at least modern Urdu ....
> 
> Meanwhile, I will beg to differ from what you wrote in post 30: Deccan Urdu is very different from the Urdu used in north and north-west India, especially in terms of pronunciation but also in matters of word choices and lexicon. Both forms of Urdu cannot be one "lingua franca".


 I agree that decisions about a language cannot be based on a single word! I was merely answering the point you raised, i.e. where does the word _anubhav_ stand in relation to Hindustani vs. Urdu. It is still unclear and just to answer this point it might be better to look at Urdu literature to see who might have used this word.

Also, I agree that Deccani Urdu is different from that of the northern areas (UP, Bihar), but we need to be clear about what we are talking about. Both speech and literature evolve over time and while Deccani Urdu speech is still distinct from our Urdu the two are not and haven’t been mutually incomprehensible! There has been a level of convergence over a period of time certainly as far as literature goes.  

Deccani literature, like that from elsewhere, is typified by older and later literary varieties of both poetry and prose. If one reads some of the earlier Deccani poets, like those of the 17th century, such as Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (composed in Deccani Urdu, Persian and Telgu, died 1611) and Ali Adil Shah II (died 1672), one can see how their language differs from ours but by the mid-late 18th century the literature produced from the Deccan was already starting to look more like ours, esp. when one reads Deccani Urdu poets, like Mah Laqa Ba’i Chanda (_maah laqaa baa’ii chandaa_) who became one of the renowned poets of the court of the then Nizams (late 18th / early 19th century). I once cited her poetry in one of the threads. Searching the net you be able to find it. Urdu literature from the South became more like ours at least in part due to influence from the North and partly due to northerners moving over and settling down in Hyderabad. Urdu reached further eastward to parts of Bengal as well.


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## greatbear

Literature is a very standardized output: it's a huge source of wonder to me how some of the members keep relying on literature to buttress their points, completely forgetting that those poets you quote are one of the tiniest segments of a population speaking a language. How can you just simply brush away people just because they are not poets and writers?

Deccan Urdu may or may not be different in terms of literature, but it is indeed a lot different in terms of language as actually used and spoken by people - even to the point of incomprehensible!


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## Faylasoof

tonyspeed said:


> This depends on what you call Urdu prose. Popular Braj Bhasha  devotioanal poetry spanning a time period from the 14th to the 18th  centuries contains
> many Sanskrit borrowings. Even the Hindi dictionary  compiled by Mirza Khan  contains Sanskrit loan words
> 
> "The  concentration of Sanskrit and Sanskritic loanwords found in Mirza  Khan's dictionary suggest how much of the text is a product of bipartite  culture" - Literary Cultures in History: Reconstruction from South Asia


 Again, as had been said countless times before, Sanskrit words do get used in Urdu though as is obvious most have come via Prakrit. Some are direct. These too have been discussed. I guess you do remmber _asiis /asiisnaa_. I first heard these from my elders.


tonyspeed said:


> So it is possible that the Urdu you are reading was written by those primarily familiar with the Persian Language.
> 
> Hindi was a conglomeration of languages and styles in a state of flux up until fairly recent times.
> How do we express big words? The choice has always been between Persian and Sanskrit, with Persian having a
> political edge over Sanskrit.


 Urdu is still a conglomerate language! The Persian vs. Sanskrit choice, if you like, is an historical accident. Two foreign languages that came to influence local languages at different times!


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## Faylasoof

greatbear said:


> Literature is a very standardized output: it's a huge source of wonder to me how some of the members keep relying on literature to buttress their points, completely forgetting that those poets you quote are one of the tiniest segments of a population speaking a language. How can you just simply brush away people just because they are not poets and writers?
> 
> Deccan Urdu may or may not be different in terms of literature, but it is indeed a lot different in terms of language as actually used and spoken by people - even to the point of incomprehensible!


 Many thanks for your contribution! Literature is not the only basis but certainly one of the basis on which we can base our discussions. If poets and writers from a region produce literature which means gibberish to the locals speaking that language then what is the point of having a literary tradition specific to a place concerned and for others to identify with it. Apart from this usual concept of literature there is also the ‘literature’ produced by government edicts, business contracts, social and political discourses etc. We need to keep that in mind too. 

The two Urdu spoken dialects under discussion are mutually incomprehensible? They certainly have their differences. In fact, I should know since some of my relations are Hyderabadi by marriage to various members of both my paternal and maternal families and I do talk to them in our Urdu and they reply in theirs and despite the differences in speech we do understand each other! 

Of course it depends whether we are talking of North Deccani or South Deccani Urdu where the former has a much bigger overlap with Urdu from the northern areas while the latter draws more influences from Kannada, Marathi, Tamil etc. making these two dialects, or if you like sub-dialects, of the Deccani speech themselves different from one another!


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## tonyspeed

greatbear said:


> Literature is a very standardized output: it's a huge source of wonder to me how some of the members keep relying on literature to buttress their points, completely forgetting that those poets you quote are one of the tiniest segments of a population speaking a language.



Yes, unfortunately, the world seems to revolve around the highly-educated people - i.e the poets and the writers. No one took note of the language the native population was speaking, but in reality, with regard to Hindi/Urdu we are talking about the language of the educated, usually city-dwellers. Common people in older times had little use for and exposure to high-level language unless they were in the mosque or the temple or doing puja. Everyday life is food, family, household, occupation, and nature. Anything beyond that becomes the realm of the literary figures and those educated in another language, thereby moving Hindi/Urdu from a spoken zubaan to a literary langauge.




Faylasoof said:


> Again, as had been said countless times before, Sanskrit words do get used in Urdu though as is obvious most have come via Prakrit. Some are direct. These too have been discussed. I guess you do remmber _asiis /asiisnaa_. I first heard these from my elders.
> Urdu is still a conglomerate language! The Persian vs. Sanskrit choice, if you like, is an historical accident. Two foreign languages that came to influence local languages at different times!




My favourite is jwaalaamukhii, not sure how widespread this word is though.

And most interestingly, both Sanskrit and Farsi have ties to Persia.


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## greatbear

tonyspeed said:


> Yes, unfortunately, the world seems to revolve around the highly-educated people - i.e the poets and the writers. No one took note of the language the native population was speaking, but in reality, with regard to Hindi/Urdu we are talking about the language of the educated, usually city-dwellers. Common people in older times had little use for and exposure to high-level language unless they were in the mosque or the temple or doing puja. Everyday life is food, family, household, occupation, and nature. Anything beyond that becomes the realm of the literary figures and those educated in another language, thereby moving Hindi/Urdu from a spoken zubaan to a literary langauge.



But spoken zubaan is equally Hindi and Urdu. It is only the academic world that revolves around highly educated people; the rest of the world is comfortably living without them and communicating their hopes, desires and loves in these languages. They are not living some incomplete life. Also, I don't know how do you have the idea that common people had little use for and exposure to high-level language: but anyway, that's outside the scope of this debate.



tonyspeed said:


> And most interestingly, both Sanskrit and Farsi have ties to Persia.



And if we go earlier in time - according to a recently promulgated and hotly debated theory, Turkey. Not just Sanskrit and Farsi, but all Indo-European languages.


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## Qureshpor

tonyspeed said:


> Yes, unfortunately, the world seems to revolve around the highly-educated people - i.e the poets and the writers. No one took note of the language the native population was speaking, but in reality, with regard to Hindi/Urdu we are talking about the language of the educated, usually city-dwellers. Common people in older times had little use for and exposure to high-level language unless they were in the mosque or the temple or doing puja. Everyday life is food, family, household, occupation, and nature. Anything beyond that becomes the realm of the literary figures and those educated in another language, thereby moving Hindi/Urdu from a spoken zubaan to a literary langauge.



Tony SaaHib, if you have read a wide range of Urdu literature and did not find in any specimen such language that is spoken by the common folk, then your comments would have validity. But if you have n't, then they are no more than mere conjecture.


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## marrish

greatbear said:


> And if we go earlier in time - according to a recently promulgated and hotly debated theory, Turkey. Not just Sanskrit and Farsi, but all Indo-European languages.


Yes, I do agree, it is interesting, but Russia has been the most accepted hypothetical area.


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## Qureshpor

> Originally Posted by *tonyspeed*
> 
> Not all scholars agree with you.
> 
> *Hindi and Urdu Since 1800: A Common Reader
> http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urduhindilinks/shacklesnell/104range.pdf *
> 
> quote: "The style of most Urdu writing in Pakistan all too accurately reflects the bombastically Persianized register of the official media" (p.18)


Tony SaaHib, please take a look at the book below, entitled "A vocabulary of technical terms used in elementary school books, Hindustani-English (1879)".

http://archive.org/stream/vocabulary...ge/n5/mode/2up

Fortunately, all the terms have Roman transliteration too. My purpose in bringing this to your and other Hindi speakers' and Urdu speakers' notice is twofold.

1) To show that the term Hindustani was nothing but another name for Urdu. I hope this is clear as daylight for everyone to see when one flicks through the pages of this little book.

2) To expose the inaccuracy of Snell and Shackle's statement above. Just see how much of the language you can understand! The language used in the "official media" of Pakistan does not come anywhere near the type of language given in this book.


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## Qureshpor

tonyspeed said:


> I am curious to hear everyone's ideas on the the history of the Urdu/Hindi split? Do you think the Modern Standard Hindi represents the language as it should be? What do you have you read to have caused the split?



 A couple of quotes from Dr. Tara chand's "The Problem of Hindustani" (1944). Christopher King of course goes into this in detail in his book when he discusses the role played by "The Hindi Movement in the Nineteenth Century".

"During recent years the problem has received increasing attention. In 1925 the Indian National Congress at its Karachi session decided that Hindustani should be the _lingua franca_ of India. A few years later, the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan met at Nagpur, and Mahatma Gandhi invited a number of linguists and scholars there to consider the question. The Sammelan unfortunately modified the resolution of the Congress, and suggested that Hindi-Hindustani should be the lingua franca of India..."

"...This decision created a great deal of stir, especially among the nationally-minded Muslims, who keenly desired a settlement, but were disappointed by this resolution. At Indore the decision of the Sahitya Sammelan was confirmed, with the result that the communal tangle became much worse..."


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## Qureshpor

The following is taken from my post 6 dated 07/10/2012 in the "chai" thread, addressed to Tony SaaHib. It would serve better purpose in this thread.

If you have McGregor's "The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary" Oxford University Press, then please read its "Introduction" where you will find him writing, "Urdu, an earlier specialisation than Hindi...". 

From Urdu Literary Culture: The Syncretic Tradition (Faruqi)...

"The Urdu-Hindi controversy was given a new twist in the first half of the twentieth century by claiming that Urdu was in fact nothing but a style (shaili) of Hindi. this implied that Modern Hindi was anterior to Urdu, with the further implication that Urdu was a comparatively late, and perhaps British inspired, arrival on the Indian linguistic scene. The boot was in fact on the other leg... Modern Hindi was a style (shaili) of Urdu. Sunil Kumar Chatterji, the greatest modern Indian linguist confirmed this:

Linguistically, it is quite correct to say that Hindi and Urdu are two forms or styles of the same Khadi-Boli Hindustani of Delhi. Urdu is not the modified, Muslimised form of what nowadays passes as Hindi, i.e., Sanskritised Khadi Boli. It is rather the other way about: Persianized Hindustani as it developed in the Mughal court circles during the eighteenth century (before that we find it in the Dakni speech of the Deccan...), ...was taken up by the Hindus...they adopted or revived the native Nagri and began to use a highly Sanskritic vocabulary...and thus they created the literary Hindi of today, round about 1800, mainly in Calcutta".

Chatterji's view was a newer version of the thesis advanced by Dr. Tara Chand, to the effect that: They [the "Hindi" authors at the College of Fort William] found a way out by adopting the language of Mir amman, [Sher Ali] Afsos, and others by excising Arabic/Persian words from it, replacing them with those of Sanskrit and Hindi [Braj etc]. Thus within a space of less than ten years, two new languages...were decked out and presented [before the public] at the behest of the foreigner... Both were look alikes in form and structure, but their faces were turned away from each other..and from that day to this, we are wondering directionless, on two paths". 

It matters not to me whether "parvarish" is in "Standard Hindi" or "Common Hindi". The fact is that according to one source, its occurrence is attested in a work of Urdu entitled "Kalimatu_lHaqaa'iq" dated 1582. Leaving "parvarish" aside, every single Persian and Arabic word in any form of Hindi can be traced back to Urdu and no where else.


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## greatbear

Recalling to you tonyspeed's words, "Making a statement such as "parvarish came into Standard Hindi through Urdu" would be correct if it were true (Since Standard Hindi is a post 1800 invention), but it is not because we would not use paravarish in Standard Hindi, only in common Hindi."
Your McGregor and company are talking only about _modern Hindi_, in your quotes, too! I also pointed this out to you in the chai thread; however, if it serves you to keep ignoring it, then you can follow your own suit. We of course know that we weren't speaking "shauhar" for "husband" prior to 1800!


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## Qureshpor

In the thread "Best way to learn Hindustani: Learn Urdu or Hindi?", bjoleniacz wrote about Urdu

"On one end is an extremely Persianized language which uses Persian grammar constructions and even uses Persian/Arabic vocabulary which would have to be looked up in a Persian, not Urdu, dictionary"

To back this view Tony SaaHib quoted Shackle and Snell from their "Hindi and Urdu Since 1800: A Common Reader"..

"The style of most Urdu writing in Pakistan all too accurately reflects the bombastically Persianized register of the official media" (p.18)

Furthermore, dispersed within this forum there are threads where it has been suggested by people that Urdu and Hindi are two registers of the same language. I would like to offer Professor Ralph Russell's (1918-2008) views on both of these points. Here is a an autobiographical link for everyone's information.

http://www.ralphrussell.co.uk/about.html

He discusses both these issues in an article published in the "Annual of Urdu Literature" entitled "Some notes on Hindi and Urdu". Essentially this is a piece concerning Christopher King's book, "One Language Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India" and its reviews by Sushil Srivastava and David Lelyveld. If anyone wishes to read the full article, it can be found here. 

http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/11/19somenotes.pdf

After discussing the vocabulary employed in Urdu and Hindi, he states.

"For example, those who advocate the view that the common stock of Hindi and Urdu vocabulary should be used as far as possible in the literary versions of both languages and attack the use of excessively Sanskritized Hindi, like to demonstrate their fairness by attacking with equal vigour an alleged form of Urdu so highly Persianized and Arabicized as to be the counterpart of the most highly Sanskritized form of Hindi. They generally add that a form of this kind is especially evident in Pakistan. This would be a very convenient argument if it had any basis in fact, but it hasn’t. People who would like to think that Prem Chand wrote Hindustani therefore assume that he did; and he didn’t. In the same way “fair-minded” opponents of excessively Sanskritized Hindi assume that there is a parallel excessively Persianized/Arabicized form of Urdu; and there isn’t. *Urdu as written both in India and Pakistan is no more Persianized/Arabicized today than it ever was. Its Persianization, if one wants to use that term, was already accomplished when modern Hindi came into existence, and there is virtually no further scope for it. There has never been, is not now, and never can be any effective “Muslim” movement to “Muslimize” Urdu in the way that the creators of modern Hindi “Indianized” it.* To use the terminology of many of the advocates of Hindi, Urdu is language with a large “foreign,” “Muslim” element imposed upon its “purely Indian” base, and the most “Muslim” of Urdu speakers can’t get away from the fact that Urdu is a partly “Indian” and partly “foreign” language. Hindi on the other hand can be to a great extent “purely Indian” through and through”

"This is very far from being a “one language, two scripts” situation. Urdu speakers would not understand the Hindi version, and vice versa; and to find a version which could equally well be called Urdu and Hindi would be quite impossible. For all practical purposes, therefore, Urdu and Hindi are two separate languages and should be described as such, despite their almost completely common structure and less completely common stock of everyday words."

"Prem Chand’s* example is clearly one of the greatest interest, but its main importance is that it proves that Hindi and Urdu already were by around1915 two separate literary languages and should long ago have been classified as such. The myth that they are not is only the most important of equally untenable ones that keep cropping up in Hindi-Urdu controversies."

* Premchand: Urdu Hindi aur Hindustani (1934)

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urduhindilinks/shacklesnell/315premchand.pdf

For our Urdu speaking friends who do not read Devagri, janaab-i-Rajiv Chakravarti SaaHib, from alt.language.urdu.poetry has kindly transcribed the piece. Here it is and Urdu readers can make up their minds as to what the style and views of Premchand were, a once Urdu short story and novel writer of great eminence.

"desh meiN aise aadmiyoN ki sankhyaa kam naheeN hai jo Urdu aur Hindi ki alag alag aur svatantr unnati aur vikaas ke maarg meiN baadhak naheeN hona chaahte. unhoN ne yeh maan liya hai k. aarambh meiN in donoN ke svaroopoN meiN chaahe jo kuchch ektaa aur samaantaa rahi ho, lekin phir bhi is samay donoN ki donoN jis raaste par jaa rahi haiN, use dekhte hue in donoN meiN mel aur ektaa honaa asambhav hi hai. pratyek bhaashaa ki ek praakr_tik pravr_tti hoti hai. Urdu kaa Faarsi aur Arabi ke saath svaabhaavik sambandh hai. unki yeh pravr_tti ham kisi shakti se rok naheeN sake. phir in donoN ko aapas meiN milaane ka prayatn kar ke ham kyoN vyarth in donoN ko haani pahuNchaaveN? 

yadi Urdu aur hindi donoN apne aapko apne janm_sthaan aur prachaar kshetr tak hi parimit rakheN to hameN inki vr_ddhi aur vikaas ke sambandh meiN koi aapatti na ho. Banglaa, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telgu* aur KannaD* aadi praanteey bhaashaaoN ke sambandh meiN hameN kisi prakaarki chinta naheeN hai. unheN adhikaar hai k. ve apne andar chaahe jitni  Sanskr_t, arabi yaa Latin aadi bharti chaleN. un bhashaaoN ke lekhak aadi svayaM hi is baat ka nirNay kar sakte haiN; parantu Urdu aur Hindi ki baat in sab se alag hai. yahaaN to donoN ko Bhaaratvarsh ki raashTreey bhaashaa kahlaane ka daava karti haiN. parantu ve apne vyaktigat roop meiN raashTreey aavashshyaktaaoN kee poorti naheeN kar sakeeN aur isi lilye saNyakt roop meiN svayaM hi unkaa saNyog aur mel aarambh ho gayaa. aur donoN ka voh sam_milit svaroop utpann ho gaya jise ham bahut Theek taur par Hindustaani zabaan kahte haiN. vaastavik baat to yeh hai k. Bhaaratvarsh ki raashTreey bhaashaa na to voh Urdu hi ho sakti hai jo Arabi aur Farsi ke aprachalit tathaa kaThin shabdoN ke bhaar se ladi rahti hai aur na voh Hindi hi ho sakti hai jo Sanskr_t ke kaThin shabdoN se ladi hui hoti hai. yadi in donoN bhaashaaoN ke paksh_paati aur samarthak aamne-saame khaRe ho kar apni saahityik bhaashaaoN meiN baateN kareN to shaayad ek doosre ka kuchch bhi matlab na samajh sakeN. hamaari raashTreey bhaasha to vohi ho sakti hai jis ka aadhaar sarva-saamaanya bodh_gamyata ho - jise sab log sahaj meiN samajh sakeN. voh is baat ki kyoN parvaah karne lagi(!) k. amuk shabd is liye chhoR diya jaana chaahiye k. voh Faarsi, Arabi athvaa Sanskr_t ka hai? voh to keval yeh maandaND apne saamne rakhti hai  k.jan_saadhaaraN yeh shabd samajh sakte haiN yaa naheeN? yaa jan_saadhaaraN meiN Hindu, Musalmaan, Punjaabi, Bangaali, MaharaasTreey aur Gujarati sabhi sam_milit haiN. yadi koi shabd yaa muhaavra yaa paaribhaashik shabd jan_saadhaaraN meiN prachalit hai to phir voh is baat ki parvaah naheeN karti k. voh kahaaN se niklaa hai aur kahaaN se aaya hai. aur yehi Hindustaani hai. aur jis prakaar angrezoN ki bhaashaa Angrezi, Jaapaan ki bhaashaa Jaapaani, Iran ki Irani aur Cheen ki Cheeni hai, usi prakaar Hindustaan ki raashTreey bhaashaa ko isi taur par Hindustaani na kah kar keval Hind kaheN to iski bhaashaa Hindi kah sakte haiN. lekin yahaaN ki bhaashaa ko Urdu to kisi prakaar kahaa hi naheeN jaa sakta, jab tak ham Hindustaan ko Urdustaan na kahne lageN, jo ab kisi prakaar sambhav hi naheeN hai. praacheen kaal ke log yahaaN ki bhaashaa ko Hindi hi kahte the."


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## greatbear

QURESHPOR said:


> *Urdu as written both in India and Pakistan is no more Persianized/Arabicized today than it ever was. Its Persianization, if one wants to use that term, was already accomplished when modern Hindi came into existence, and there is virtually no further scope for it. There has never been, is not now, and never can be any effective “Muslim” movement to “Muslimize” Urdu in the way that the creators of modern Hindi “Indianized” it.*



No need to put "creators" in the blue font, as you and marrish have been switching between "Hindi" and "modern Hindi" to suit your arguments: talk about one thing! marrish was talking about "creators of Hindi", not "creators of modern Hindi". 

What the writer can be is evident from one little fragment I've highlighted above: why on earth can there be no further scope for more Persianization of Urdu? Also, what does that writer mean there by "virtually"? Doesn't make any sense to me.

And if you wish to tell me that I cannot understand a Pakistani or a Pakistani me, then ok, you are welcome to live in that world: but they are different registers to me of the same language as to me we are speaking the same language with essentially the same grammar and syntax with different choices of words at times. Yes, there is an Urdu with too much Persianization and a Hindi with too much Sanskritization, which if and when used makes understanding more difficult or even impossible: but there are always many subregisters of a language, not comprehensible between them. Any language straddles a wide spectrum, which leads to its richness.

It has been always clear from your posts so far that you want some kind of rigid division between Hindi and Urdu, and that for you Hindustani is Urdu; your point is well noted. And many of us do disagree here; the number of citations that you produce won't do much especially for us native speakers who know how entrenched are many of the Sanskrit-origin and Persian-origin words in segments of populations.


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## greatbear

QURESHPOR said:


> "Prem Chand’s* example is clearly one of the greatest interest, but its main importance is that it proves that Hindi and Urdu already were by around1915 *two separate literary languages *and should long ago have been classified as such. The myth that they are not is only the most important of equally untenable ones that keep cropping up in Hindi-Urdu controversies."



Of course, the literary registers of Hindi and Urdu are very wide apart; was there ever a question about it? I by and large agree with Premchand: he is decrying the same "division" between Hindi and Urdu that you seem to be so much in favour of, and neither does he see Hindustani = Urdu (a preposterous idea IMO!).


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## marrish

Our old good friend Platts seems to be clear about it (Hindustani=Urdu) in a very humble entry:

H ت _te; त ta: The fourth letter of the Urdū or Hindūstānī alphabet, and the sixteenth consonant of the Nāgarī or Hindī,_


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## marrish

greatbear said:


> No need to put "creators" in the blue font, as you and marrish have been switching between "Hindi" and "modern Hindi" to suit your arguments: talk about one thing! marrish was talking about "creators of Hindi", not "creators of modern Hindi".
> 
> [...]And if you wish to tell me that I cannot understand a Pakistani or a Pakistani me, then ok, you are welcome to live in that world: but they are different registers to me of the same language as to me we are speaking the same language with essentially the same grammar and syntax with different choices of words at times. Yes, there is an Urdu with too much Persianization and a Hindi with too much Sanskritization, which if and when used makes understanding more difficult or even impossible: but there are always many subregisters of a language, not comprehensible between them. Any language straddles a wide spectrum, which leads to its richness.


I shall quote my relevant post from the other thread since I spent some time on it and wouldn't like it to get lost. I think that this thread is a better place for it:



marrish said:


> Well, if you had bothered to read my post properly, you would have noticed that my use of ''creators'' is merely repeating what the renowned Indian linguists, Dr. Sunil Kumar Chatterji has said. I will highlight the words to facilitate your reading. By the way, he is not the only one who has used words such as ''created'', ''artificial'', ''invented'' or similar words regarding this unnatural process in bringing about Modern Hindi. With regard to your comment on Urdu, I shall comment on it at the end after you have had time to digest what various scholars have said about Modern Hindi.
> 
> 1. Dr. Sunil Kumar Chatterji, A Polyglot Nation, and its Linguistic problems vis-à-vis National Integration, Mumbai, Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Research Centre, 1973, pp 50-54:
> 
> "Persianized Hindustani as it developed in the Mughal court circles during the eighteenth century (before that we find it in the Dakni speech of the Deccan...), ...was taken up by the Hindus...they adopted or revived the native Nagri and began to use a highly Sanskritic vocabulary...and thus they *created *the literary Hindi of today, round about 1800, mainly in Calcutta".
> 
> 2. Dr. Tara Chand, In Hindustani, A collection of Urdu talks broadcast from All India Radio, Delhi, in 1939 and published in Maktaba Jami’a, New Delhi, n.d, (circa 1940), pp 11-12
> 
> "They [the "Hindi" authors at the College of Fort William] found a way out by adopting the language of Mir Amman, [Sher Ali] Afsos, and others by* excising Arabic/Persian words from it, replacing them with those of Sanskrit and Hindi [Braj etc]*. Thus within a space of less than ten years, two new languages[...]were decked out and presented [before the public] at the behest of the foreigner... Both were look alikes in form and structure, but their faces were turned away from each other...and from that day to this, we are wandering directionless, on two paths".
> 
> 3. Dr. Tara Chand, The Problem of Hindustani 1944
> 
> "Among them were Braj and Urdu. Braj, as has been indicated above, was the language of poetry, and did not lend itself readily for the purposes of prose. Urdu, which was studied by both Hindus and Muslims, was naturally selected as the common language of India. Unfortunately the zeal for finding distinctions led the professors of the College to encourage attempts to *create* a new type of Urdu, from which all Persian and Arabic words were removed and replaced by Sanskrit words. This was done ostensibly to provide the Hindus with a language of their own. But the step had far-reaching consequences, and India is still suffering from this *artificial bifurcation* of tongues.
> 
> Modern Hindi was till then unknown, for no literature existed in it. It was at this time that it began to be employed for literary purposes. The professors of the college encouraged Lallooji Lal and other teachers to compose books in the language used by the Urdu writers; but to substitute Sanskritic words (tatsama) for Persian and Arabic words. Thus the *new style was born *which was considered specially suited to the requirements of the Hindus, and the Christian missionaries gave a fillip to it by translating the Bible in it."
> 
> 4. Mr. F. E. Keay, the author of A History of Hindi Literature, Heritage of India series
> 
> "Urdu however, had a vocabulary borrowed largely from the Persian and Arabic languages, which were specially connected with Muhammadanism. A literary language for Hindi-speaking people which could commend itself more to Hindus was very desirable, and the result was obtained by taking Urdu and *expelling from it words of Persian and Arabic origin*, and substituting for them words of Sanskrit or Hindi origin."
> 
> [....]comment about Urdu:
> 
> _Khari Boli or Hindustani has two literary forms. The earlier form, called Hindi by its users, and now known as Urdu, has a continuous history from the 14th century to the present day. _(Dr. Tara Chand)
> 
> A short essay about it can be consulted here: http://www.virginia.edu/mesa/Events/...the%20Urdu.pdf


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## greatbear

marrish said:


> Our old good friend Platts seems to be clear about it (Hindustani=Urdu) in a very humble entry:
> 
> H ت _te; त ta: The fourth letter of the Urdū or Hindūstānī alphabet, and the sixteenth consonant of the Nāgarī or Hindī,_



Platts is talking about the alphabet, not language. And if Platts were to equate Urdu to Hindustani as language, then it would only be a discredit to him.


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## greatbear

As for the so-called "creators" of modern Hindi, posts 27 and 28 at the thread http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1564047&page=2 already have given a suitable answer: there is no need to go over ground that is already covered.


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## marrish

greatbear said:


> marrish said:
> 
> 
> 
> Our old good friend Platts seems to be clear about it (Hindustani=Urdu) in a very humble entry:
> 
> H ت _te; त ta: The fourth letter of the Urdū or Hindūstānī alphabet, and the sixteenth consonant of the Nāgarī or Hindī,_
> 
> 
> 
> Platts is talking about the alphabet, not language. And if Platts were to equate Urdu to Hindustani as language, then it would only be a discredit to him.
Click to expand...


The credit or discredit is a matter of opinion. His dictionary was first published in 1884. Ten years prior to this, he authored a grammar book with the title, "A Grammar of the Hindustani or Urdu Language". I don't believe anyone who understands English would find any ambiguity in the title!


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## greatbear

Who's talking about who published what and when? It's your quoted sentence that I was talking about!


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## tonyspeed

A Grammar of the Hindustani Language - John Shakespeare 1826 says on page two:

"it is moreover called Hindi and Hindustani" (speaking of Urdu). 
Esentially, at an early date, Urdu and Hindi and Hindustani were all considered the same language.

This book even goes so far as to teach both Devanagari and Persian script.


A Dictionary English and Hindustani - John Shakespeare 3rd Edition 1834 contains words of both Sanskritic and Perso-Arabic origin. He explains in the intro that a variety of dialects exist in India "whether denominated zaban-i-urdu, rekhta, hindi, Hindustani, or Dakhani; (Capitilisation his) and words of common use in some parts may appear strange, or even unintelligible, to the inhabitants of others." "the language here treated of, ... is essentially one and the same"


In 1907 , How to Learn Hindustani by Chapman states "It (Hindustani) has several recognised varieties, of which the principal are Urdu and Hindi. "


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## Faylasoof

tonyspeed said:


> A Grammar of the Hindustani Language - John Shakespeare 1826 says on page two:
> 
> "it is moreover called Hindi and Hindustani" (speaking of Urdu).
> Esentially, at an early date, Urdu and Hindi and Hindustani were all considered the same language.
> 
> This book even goes so far as to teach both Devanagari and Persian script.
> 
> 
> A Dictionary English and Hindustani - John Shakespeare 3rd Edition 1834 contains words of both Sanskritic and Perso-Arabic origin. He explains in the intro that a variety of dialects exist in India "whether denominated zaban-i-urdu, rekhta, hindi, Hindustani, or Dakhani; (Capitilisation his) and words of common use in some parts may appear strange, or even unintelligible, to the inhabitants of others." "the language here treated of, ... is essentially one and the same"
> 
> 
> In 1907 , How to Learn Hindustani by Chapman states "It (Hindustani) has several recognised varieties, of which the principal are Urdu and Hindi. "


Colloquial Hindi and middle register Urdu have a large overlap. I think we’ve already been through this discussion many times in the forum over the last few years. 

The term Hindustani was being used by the British just as another term for middle-register Urdu and most of the grammars produced by them used the Urdu script. 

One has considerable choice in looking at a sizable collection of Hindustani-Urdu books in *this threa**d*, post #28. I collected them for your convenience!

The use of the terms Hindvi/ Hindavi and even Hindi to describe Urdu / rextah (riixtah) was once never considered a real issue since Hindi was, and still, is being used as a generic term. We have Colloquial Hindi, Sanskritised (shuddh) Hindi and Hindi to mean any of the dialects spoken (or those no longer spoken, like Braj) mainly in the UP-Bihar area – an obvious source of confusion as to what 'Hindi' are we talking about! Besides, one can of course write Urdu-Hindustani in Nagari just as one can use the Latin script instead. Various British authors tried them all but most appear to have opted for the Urdu script. 

In the same post (#28) I refer to above, there is also a book covering Hindustani of Southern India. I had a quick read and this is typical Dakkaani Urdu - North Dakkani that is. Urdu and North Dakkani have much in common. Please do have a look at this book too. 

Sorry, but who said that in Urdu we shy away from words of Sanskrit origin! We keep referring to our favourite lexicon, Platts, where this etymology is constantly mentioned. Most of the words of Sanskrit origin that we use seem to have come via Prakrit though.


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## tonyspeed

In regards to the age of "Hindi":



QURESHPOR said:


> However assigning some form of “antiquity” to  a language, be it “shuddh Hindi” or any other requires corroboration  from the pens of esteemed scholars.



If we consider braj bhaashaa the same as Hindi then GB's statements approach accuracy to some extent. (See http://hindiurduflagship.org/resources/learning-teaching/braj-bhasha-reader/  ) The golden age of Braj literature seems to be the 1500s and Braj  contained a bit more Sanskrit content than Urdu. Yet, at the same time,  it contained no where near as much Sanskritic content as Standardised  Shuddh Hindi, and "exhibits a relatively chaste form of the true  vernacular phonology and lexicon of " north indian languages according  to the author of the above reader.

If we view Hindi as only tied to kharii bolii and no other north Indian  dialect then you are correct. And I think certain close-minded  historians have a tendency to
see Hindi as such and focus on the change which occured to kharii bolii.

But seeing that the Braj heartland is right beside the Kharii boli  region, I think we have to give it its due respect as an integral part  of the
history of Hindi.


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## greatbear

Braj is of course Hindi: a dialect of it. My father comes from the Braj region, and his family speaks in Braj bhasha even today - which is why it's always very interesting for me to meet them, for the register they use, the accent they employ, etc. Yet, not only we are perfectly comprehensible to each other, but we can also appreciate each other's expressions, humour, and wit - for those who think Braj is something different have no idea of Hindi and its roots.

Similarly, Awadhi is as much Hindi, again merely a dialect of Hindi. The hymns of Tulsidas are sung all over India - and they are understood as well. In crores of Hindi-speaking homes, Hanuman Chalisa is read - and its meaning is easily understandable to all of us. There are several Sanskrit-derived words in those books: as for literature, even these should suffice, for Chalisa itself is not merely a devotional song, but a beautifully rhymed lyrical verse.

As I said, words like "charitr", "dhanyvaad", "sookshm", "saNkshipt", "namaskaar", and "kaThin" weren't invented in 1800s: neither they are Urdu. That's why if India was speaking Hindustani, then the claim that Hindustani is same as Urdu is bogus. Because Indians have been using these words since always. Thousands of words like "kaThin" have been part and parcel of Indians' speech since centuries and centuries, much even before the Muslim invaders came; travel across the length and breadth of India, and speak to people living in such remote parts where they have had no education. They will understand easily words derived from Sanskrit but not those from Persian. Sample the great 15th-century poet Narsinh Mehta's Gujarati poems - and you will find those thousands of shared Sanskrit and Brij words between Hindi and Gujarati.

Hindustani was a mix of words coming from all sources: it certainly wasn't the Persianized Urdu of PTV. The so-called creators of modern Hindi created monstrous terms like "shubh raatri" and nice terms like "udyogikaraN": but not many others imprinted in our consciousness and heritage.


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## Qureshpor

People who bring in distinct languages such as Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj and others as "dialects" of Hindi do so not only for political reasons because this gives them the electoral numerical superiority but also because these languages conveniently afford a bit of respectability by filling in the vacuum existing due to lack of any Hindi literature prior to its birth in the 1800s. Inclusion of these languages under the wings of Hindi is almost as ridiculous as the author of the article below, according to whom everyone, barring the Dravidian languages, speaks Hindi!

http://www.importanceoflanguages.com/LearnHindi/tag/khariboli-dialect/

If one reads histories of Urdu literature, one never finds authors such as Amir Khusrau (1253-1325) and Kabir (1440-1518) because Urdu, like the Hindi of the 1800s, has its basis in KhaRii-Bolii and not Awadhi, Bhojpuri or Braj. If all these languages come under the Hindi mother hen's wings, then Urdu would also have equal right to call these languages Urdu and include their literature as its own! But Urdu does not need to appropriate any other language's literary heritage and treat it as its own. In matters of law, this would be termed "theft"!

Time to bring in Tulsidas (1532-1623) and his works in Awadhi, as well as other matters. All quotations are from Dr. Tara Chand's 1944 edition of the problem of Hindustani.

"While Hindustani was making rapid strides in the South, the North witnessed the rise of literatures, largely religious, in Avadhi and Braj Bhasha. Both Hindus and Muslims patronized these languages. Avadhi was brought into vogue by reformers and poets like Kabir and Malik Muhammad Jayasi, and on the foundation laid by them Tulasidas reared the magnificent structure of _Ramcharitamanas_. Braja speech became the voice of bhakti to Krishna. If Surdas poured out the yearnings of his heart in his immortal songs, Raskhan, a Muslim, vied with him in composing lyrics of moving beauty.   And Rahim, the son of Bairam Khan, excelled in didactic poems. Here is a miracle of linguistic and cultural history. Sons born of fathers who were complete aliens to the thought and speech of India meet with the highest exponents of the native culture, on terms of equality!

Thus the main currents of literature in the 15th and succeeding centuries flowed in two channels, Braj Bhasha and Avadhi. Not only did Hindu writers use them; Muslim poets also made them their own. Rahim, Raskhan, Raslin are as well known in the history of Braj Bhasha poetry as any Hindu poets; and everyone recognizes that but for Malik Muhammad Jayasi's foundational work, Avadhi might never have produced the glorious structure of _Ramacharitamanas_."

So, by the time the "invading Muslims" were writing works in Urdu, Braj, Awadhi and other languages, they were part of settled communities just like the "invading Aryans" who wrote works such as Mahabharata and Shakuntala. 

"Among them were Braj and Urdu. Braj, as has been indicated above, was the language of poetry, and did not lend itself readily for the purposes of prose. Urdu, which was studied by both Hindus and Muslims, was naturally selected as the common language of India. Unfortunately the zeal for finding distinctions led the professors of the College to encourage attempts to create a new type of Urdu, from which all Persian and Arabic words were removed and replaced by Sanskrit words. This was done ostensibly to provide the Hindus with a language of their own. But the step had far-reaching consequences, and India is still suffering from this artificial bifurcation of tongues."

"When some people speak about the development of Hindi they fail to take note of the fact that the history of Hindi is distinct from the history of languages like Rajasthani, Braj Bhasha, and Avadhi; and they equally ignore the fact that a great deal is common to the history of Hindi and Urdu."

Speakers of Bhojpuri are still campaigning to have it included as one of the official languages  as per the 8th schedule of the constitution. By the end of the 19th century this language was written in Kaithi as well as the Nasta3liiq script. 

I believe I will be wasting my time if I were to talk about the term “Hindustani” yet again because I have already done so, at great length with documentary evidence. No one has suggested that words such as “charitr”, “suukhsm” and the like were invented at Fort William College in the 1800s but what has been shown, again with documentary proof (as shown above and below) that Urdu words, which were part of common speech of all communities were replaced by such words in the newly created works at the afore mentioned college. This is how Modern Hindi began its life. 

"Urdu, however, was regarded by both Hindus and Mussalmans of the 18th century as their _lingua franca_. Bhartendu Harishchandra, one of the pioneers of Modern Hindi, acknowledged in the middle of the 19th century that Urdu was the language of polite speech in the North, even among the members of his community (Agarwals). So when the East India Company ordered the establishment of the Fort William College in Calcutta to teach Indian languages to their officers,   Urdu was the language for which teachers were appointed, as also for the classical languages, Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit, and provincial languages like Bengali and Brajbhasha.

Modern Hindi was till then unknown, for no literature existed in it. It was at this time that it began to be employed for literary purposes. The professors of the college encouraged Lallooji Lal and other teachers to compose books in the language used by the Urdu writers; but to substitute Sanskritic words (_tatsama_) for Persian and Arabic words. Thus the new style was born which was considered specially suited to the requirements of the Hindus, and the Christian missionaries gave a fillip to it by translating the Bible in it."

Finally, PTV's Urdu. Many of the main personalities involved in this enterprise were people who had come from Urdu speaking regions and centres like Delhi, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Bhopal, Aurangabad etc. So, unlike DD's Hindi based on the Calcutta school of thought, PTV's Urdu was not manufactured in TV studios but is the living language of Urdu speaking peoples.


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## greatbear

It will be a waste of effort to reply to your posts, which are merely repeated citations from same sources, ignoring ground realities. Kabir and Rahim are _taught_ in Hindi: they are of course Hindi writers, to be more precise. Urdu is not some mother language: it is merely a register of Hindustani. If you didn't suggest that words like "sookshm" weren't invented in the 1800s, then your repeated argument that Hindustani is same as Urdu is also fake.

Also, Muslims did invade the Indian subcontinent, and also imposed their religion and languages on us: no point in putting that in scare quotes, as if that didn't happen. I advise you to not to go there. Whereas your so-called Aryan invasion is a recognised "theory": there is nothing definitive on it. Go back to facts, and then talk: long posts and citations from some scholar or two don't make lies reality.


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## Qureshpor

"So, by the time the "invading Muslims" were writing works in Urdu, Braj, Awadhi and other languages, they were part of settled communities just like the "invading Aryans" who wrote works such as Mahabharata and Shakuntala." QP

There is nothing substantive in post 69 but the contents of the second paragraph, irrelevant as they are, are also most unfortunate. Human beings have been invading lands once Lucy, a hominid, moved out of Africa. When India's land mass broke away from Africa's, there were no Sanskrit speaking individuals on it already when this land mass collided with Asia. We know Dravidians were already there all over India, not just in the south, before the arrival of the Aryans. Even today there are pockets of Dravidian people known as Brahui (Brohi) who speak a Dravidian language, in Baluchistan, Pakistan. 

Concerning the "imposition of religion and languages" by the "invading Muslims", all I can say is that hundreds of millions of the natives who managed to remain non-Muslim and non-Urdu speaking must have swum across to Sri Lanka (building a bridge would have taken too long) and stayed there. By the time they swam back, Europeans had arrived there who forced them to speak English, Portuguese and French and converted them to Christianity! But there is still a mystery! How come there are millions and millions of non-Muslims in India still AND speaking languages other than Urdu!?

Edit: I just wish to add that I neither brought history nor religion into this thread. Further to this, the "invading Muslims" did not speak Urdu!


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## greatbear

You did bring religion and history into this thread, by quoting "invading Muslims" and "invading Aryans" (post 68), so don't pretend to be innocent, please. I have no desire to continue arguing with your myopic view of history, as it falls outside the scope of these forums.


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## Qureshpor

^ See Post 67


> Thousands of words like "kaThin" have been part and parcel of Indians' speech since centuries and centuries, much even before the *Muslim invaders* came; travel across the length and breadth of India, and speak to people living in such remote parts where they have had no education.


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## greatbear

Forget it! While I was merely mentioning a bit of history while saying something else, you make it a point of discussion (from post 68 onwards), but if you're not ready to admit it, it's not a matter of concern.

Why don't you rather answer the question that I have been asking you since a long time? You have also side-stepped questions inconvenient to you in the "manaanaa" thread. According to you, Hindustani = Khari boli = Urdu; and yet I don't think "sooskhm" belongs to Urdu - which you will admit. Neither was it created in the 1800s - nor were "dhanyavaad" or "charitr". Could you just tell me the name of the language to which these words belong, in your opinion?

Off-topic addition: Just for your enlightenment purposes, Lucy is not considered to be a direct ancestor of humans  ... and there are older hominins you could've mentioned! You really go overboard sometimes in going off-topic.


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## marrish

greatbear said:


> Off-topic addition: Just for your enlightenment purposes, Lucy is not considered to be a direct ancestor of humans  ... and there are older hominins you could've mentioned! You really go overboard sometimes in going off-topic.


For the fun, perhaps Eve and Adam, but this is really of topic! Just to give the debate a lighter tone!


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## tonyspeed

I have found a few quotes of substantial importance to our discussion:

*A sketch of the Hindustani language*

 By Sir Charles James Lyall (Published 1882) page 4 - 7

"Urdu  with its varieties of Rekhtah and Dakhni, counts a long list of  writers; grammars and dictionaries of it are readily accessible.
High Hindi, as distinguished from Urdu, is an idiom of recent growth, owing its literary cultivation in a great measure to
the influence of the education department in North India , and to the development of Hindu opposition to Muhammadan forms 
of expression"

"Of Old Hindui the specimens available to Europeans are not numerous. A portion of Prithiraj Rasau , a heroic peom...
Adi Granth, which embodies many valuable speciments of Old Hindui in the poems of the Bhagats...Portions of
the poems of Kabir"

"Of later Hindui literature (Sur Das, Tulsi Das, etc) and of compositions in modern Braj Bhasha there are many specimens...
The best known prose work in the last named dialect is the Rajniti of Lallu Lal"

"Of the other Hindi dialects our knowledge is derived mainly from the Grammar of Kellog"

"The  type represented by Urdu and its literary sister High Hindi (frequently  called, for shortness, Hindi) forms the main topic of
this notice"

"The very unsettled state of the orthography of Hindi, and the possbility that in the transmission of ancient works their style
has been modernised, also help to make the study of Old Hindi a subject in which absolute certainty is difficult of attainment"

"Tatsamas are Sanskrit words used in Hindustani without any further alteration...the tatsamas are all of late adoption,
and either express ideas the necessity of words for which has only recently been felt or replace tadbhavas which have
fallen into disuse"

"The foreign element is sometimes described as Persian and Arabic; but no borrowing direct from the latter language has
ever taken place in Hindustani...No genuine old Hindi literature if free from such importations. They abound in Chand (aboud 1250 AD),
the  singer of the last stand made by the native princes of the north  against the invader. The verses of Kabir (about 1500) and his followers  are
even more copiously stocked with them. Tulsi-Das (about 1600),  though his theme, having been already treated in the sacred Sanskrit by  his 
predecessor Valmiki, supplied him with fewer occassions for  their introduction, nevertheless uses them not unfrequently. In the  common rustic speech
they are constantly heard"

"But though  such words are freely used in the spoken vernacular and in its works  written in the Devanagari character, they are much more frequent in  Urdu...
and Persian models have throughout supplied inspiration to  Indian writers. In this idiom the same abuse in manifest as in the  so-called High Hindi; writers, to
display their learning, have  rejected vernacular forms of common use in favour of less known Persian  terms, as in the latter recourse has been had to Sanskrit"


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## Qureshpor

The following paragraph is taken from "Report of the National Seminar on Script". (17/03/2012)

"Dr Alok Rai, who is considered an authority on the ‘Hindi-Urdu Controversy’, traced the controversy from the 19th century and explained how a controversy which began with the demand for a script (Nagari), developed into a language demand (Hindi) and further became a political demand splitting two communities apart (Hindu and Muslim) and culminated in the creation of two nations (India and Pakistan)." 

http://lists.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet-goanet.org/2012-March/219821.html


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## greatbear

Man is known by his work: this Alok Rai need not be even read - his ridiculous claims do (rather, undo) everything for him.

Meanwhile, QP, in the interests of honour, at least, you should answer post 73 - you have been escaping answering that question since a long time on many threads, including this one. Or, else, if you don't want to, then you mustn't repeat the same hollow theories, time and again.


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## marrish

I'd like to share a very recent BBC article here which is worth reading. Although the subject matter is the general linguistic situation in India, the following quote is nevertheless of interest to this thread:



> Hindi, the official language of central government, *is an artificial and largely unspoken 20th Century construct*.


 (formatting mine)


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## BP.

greatbear said:


> ...
> Hindustani was a mix of words coming from all sources: it certainly wasn't the Persianized Urdu of PTV. ...


 That's a little surprising, cinse I never imagined even common folk speaking the the language finding PTV's Urdu exceptionally Persianised. It's just your everyday Urdu, someitmes less Persianized if you will to what the ears of some of us are accustomed to.


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## Wolverine9

I think part of the discrepancy between the perspectives of greatbear and others in this thread lies in the definition of Hindi.  By saying Hindi was created in the 19th century, I don't believe anyone is referring to colloquial Hindi; rather, shuddh Hindi is what is meant.  Colloquial Hindi (i.e. Khari boli), which has interchangeably been called Hindustani or Urdu, has obviously been spoken since the transition from Prakrit around 1000 years ago.  I don't think anyone is disputing that.  Colloquial Hindi does, to varying degrees, depending on the background and cultural orientation of the speaker, utilize words of Sanskrit origin as mentioned above.  Those words may or may not be considered part of Urdu as defined today; however, prior to the 19th century they were considered part of Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani, since all three terms referred to one and the same language.  That shuddh Hindi is a recent creation should be obvious.  For what purpose would a shuddh Hindi have even served prior to the 19th century?  Just think about it.  There had been no need to root out Perso-Arabic vocabulary prior to this time.  Persian was the language of administration in north India for centuries, so it was only natural that Perso-Arabic vocabulary, again to varying degrees, depending on the speaker and the region, would be incorporated into the local language.  This was not just the case for Khari boli, but every language across north India, uses Perso-Arabic vocabulary.  Moreover, since Persian was the language of administration, Khari boli, which was based in and around the capital of Delhi and perhaps more influenced by Persian than other languages, would of course adopt the Perso-Arabic script for its literature.  Since Khari boli was so closely associated with the Persian of administration, as far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong), I don't think it was even written in Devanagari until after 1800.  It was only after the Mughal influence declined that the Perso-Arabic script started to lose its appeal among many speakers of the language.  Devanagari then entered and filled the void.

As an aside, it seems Hindustani has also changed definitions over the centuries.  Prior to the 19th century, Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani, were all the same language.  In the 19th century, after shuddh Hindi developed, Urdu and Hindustani were used interchangeably, and now, Hindustani refers to an intermediate form of the two languages, with Hindi properly referring to the shuddh form, and Urdu properly referring to a heavily Persianized form (at least from the perspective of Hindustani speakers not used to such vocabulary).  As a Bollywood example, I've heard many refer to the film Mughal-e-Azam as a form of proper Urdu, with its heavy use of Persian vocabulary.


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## greatbear

Wolverine9 said:


> I think part of the discrepancy between the perspectives of greatbear and others in this thread lies in the definition of Hindi. ...  Colloquial Hindi (i.e. Khari boli), which has interchangeably been called Hindustani or Urdu, has obviously been spoken since the transition from Prakrit around 1000 years ago.  I don't think anyone is disputing that.  Colloquial Hindi does, to varying degrees, depending on the background and cultural orientation of the speaker, utilize words of Sanskrit origin as mentioned above.  Those words may or may not be considered part of Urdu as defined today; however, prior to the 19th century they were considered part of Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani, since all three terms referred to one and the same language.



I agree by and large with your summation, Wolverine. However, there are a couple of members who do shy away from defining Hindi: so, often we still remain _jahaaN ke tahaaN_. I have asked for this definition not only in this particular thread but also in a couple of others: a couple of Urdu-speaking members, notably QP, has defined modern Urdu the same as Hindustani, and according to him that (thus, modern Urdu - of course, I believe that for these couple of members, Urdu is still the same except a bit of corrupting here and there, so my term "modern Urdu" would be disliked) was the only language spoken prior to this "invention" of "shuddh" Hindi. This is where I differ: I have asked him many times about some example words - does he consider them a part of pre-19th century Hindi or not? But, alas, I am still waiting for those answers.

I have often conversed with Pakistanis: and yet, one is talking Urdu and the other is talking Hindi. No, we were talking Hindustani, the middle ground. I wasn't bringing in "heavy" Sanskrit-derived words, and he wasn't bringing in the equivalent from Persian-Arabic. We would use "log" for people, since otherwise the word I know and use is "prajaa" and he uses "awaam" - not every speaker of my ilk would be conversant of the latter and not everyone of his ilk of the former. But, yes, Hindustani would include both for me. And "prajaa" is not Urdu. Yet it is Hindustani.


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## Wolverine9

greatbear said:


> This is where I differ: I have asked him many times about some example words - does he consider them a part of pre-19th century Hindi or not? But, alas, I am still waiting for those answers.



By shuddh Hindi, he is referring to the systematic replacement of Perso-Arabic vocabulary with Sanskrit that was done around 1800, not referring to particular Sanskrit words that may or may not have been used in colloquial speech prior to this time.  There were certainly some Sanskrit words used pre-19th century as you've previously alluded to, but shuddh Hindi contains an abundance of Sanskrit words that are not used in everyday speech.  These words were added during the 19th century to differentiate the language from Urdu.  All of the sources that have been quoted are correct in my opinion.  Again, by referring to the "invention" of Hindi, the sources are not referring to the normal, everyday language, but the heavily Sanskritized literary one, which in modern times includes both Sanskrit equivalents of Perso-Arabic words and translations of English terms.  These Sanskrit formations in some cases were a natural part of spoken Sanskrit and in others they are artificial creations, such as "shubh ratri", which is a direct translation of the English phrase.

If you're interested in an example of this systematic replacement, here's one.  The shuddh Hindi word for 'if' is 'yadi'.  This word was used in Sanskrit and may have existed in Hindi to some degree before 1800, but the common colloquial term in Hindi was and still is 'agar', which is a Persian word.  Yet, shuddh Hindi preferentially chooses to use the word 'yadi' even though not too many people use it in speech.  It was words such as these that were stressed or added to shuddh Hindi from the 19th century onwards, where as such an emphasis did not exist before this time.


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## greatbear

^ I do know what one means when shuddh Hindi is being referred to, Wolverine, and I don't think the thread is about the discussion of shuddh Hindi. When a user asks for "the Hindi equivalent of saabun", his intentions are very clear to me. Since you are new to the forum, you may not know the discussions centred on the Urdu-Hindi divide in several threads, not just this one.


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## Qureshpor

Wolverine9 said:


> I think part of the discrepancy between the perspectives of greatbear and others in this thread lies in the definition of Hindi.  By saying Hindi was created in the 19th century, I don't believe anyone is referring to colloquial Hindi; rather, shuddh Hindi is what is meant.  Colloquial Hindi (i.e. Khari boli), which has interchangeably been called Hindustani or Urdu, has obviously been spoken since the transition from Prakrit around 1000 years ago.  I don't think anyone is disputing that.  Colloquial Hindi does, to varying degrees, depending on the background and cultural orientation of the speaker, utilize words of Sanskrit origin as mentioned above.  Those words may or may not be considered part of Urdu as defined today; however, prior to the 19th century they were considered part of Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani, since all three terms referred to one and the same language.  That shuddh Hindi is a recent creation should be obvious.  For what purpose would a shuddh Hindi have even served prior to the 19th century?  Just think about it.  There had been no need to root out Perso-Arabic vocabulary prior to this time.  Persian was the language of administration in north India for centuries, so it was only natural that Perso-Arabic vocabulary, again to varying degrees, depending on the speaker and the region, would be incorporated into the local language.  This was not just the case for Khari boli, but every language across north India, uses Perso-Arabic vocabulary.  Moreover, since Persian was the language of administration, Khari boli, which was based in and around the capital of Delhi and perhaps more influenced by Persian than other languages, would of course adopt the Perso-Arabic script for its literature.  Since Khari boli was so closely associated with the Persian of administration, as far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong), I don't think it was even written in Devanagari until after 1800.  It was only after the Mughal influence declined that the Perso-Arabic script started to lose its appeal among many speakers of the language.  Devanagari then entered and filled the void.
> 
> As an aside, it seems Hindustani has also changed definitions over the centuries.  Prior to the 19th century, Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani, were all the same language.  In the 19th century, after shuddh Hindi developed, Urdu and Hindustani were used interchangeably, and now, Hindustani refers to an intermediate form of the two languages, with Hindi properly referring to the shuddh form, and Urdu properly referring to a heavily Persianized form (at least from the perspective of Hindustani speakers not used to such vocabulary).  As a Bollywood example, I've heard many refer to the film Mughal-e-Azam as a form of proper Urdu, with its heavy use of Persian vocabulary.


Thank you for your thoughts on this subject. "Hindi", "Hindvi", "Rextah", Hindustani and other names have been used for a language that had KharRii-Bolii as its basis and developed over a period of centuries across wide tracts of the country into the language we know as Urdu . From the very beginnings to now, it has always been written in the Urdu script. Nagri's link to Modern Hindi is described in Ch. 5 of Christopher.R. King's "One Language, Two Scripts- The Hindi Movement in the Nineteenth Century" where interested parties can read for themselves how and when this script began to be used. 

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urduhindilinks/king/king.html

The term "Hindi" for Urdu has been used by Iqbal in a Persian work of his as late as the 1915 and Ghalib before him has on occasions used the word "Hindi" in his letters for his poetry. We of course know that neither of the authors wrote in the Hindi which became the national language of India after independence. Those who can not read Urdu, can listen to some of Iqbal's poems and Ghalib's letters on Youtube. These are of course in Urdu and not "colloquial Hindi".

If by colloquial Hindi, one means the language spoken in majority of the "Bollywood Hindi Films", then once again this language is much closer to the spoken and written Urdu, leaving aside the sprinkling of the odd maataa-pitaa , vishvaas and the like. Ordinary literary Hindi, even when it is not "shuddh" (pure), has its own defining characteristics. It has "yah", "vah", "ye", "ve" etc and this is not how most people utter these words in spoken Hindi or Urdu. There are other distinctions too, most of them due to usage of Nagri. See below.

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2195264&highlight=A+Brief+Comparison

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2305762&highlight=Spelling+Conventions

The language prior to its transformation at Fort William College, where it was put through a sieve to remove words of Arabic and Persian origins, was nothing but the Urdu that had taken centuries to get to that stage. The ousted words were replaced by words of Sanskrit origins but one slight problem arose. However good the sifting process was, one could not remove these words from the hearts and minds of people who had been using them for centuries. To add insult to injury, Sanskrit could not furnish words for "saabun", "kursii" and many more. And to obtain the ultimate "shuddhataa" one would of course need to remove the word "Hindi" too!!

Similar descriptions have been used for Urdu elsewhere in the forum. It would be nice to post one or two examples of this "heavily persianised" form of Urdu.


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## Qureshpor

Wolverine9 said:


> By shuddh Hindi, he is referring to the systematic replacement of Perso-Arabic vocabulary with Sanskrit that was done around 1800, not referring to particular Sanskrit words that may or may not have been used in colloquial speech prior to this time.  There were certainly some Sanskrit words used pre-19th century as you've previously alluded to, but shuddh Hindi contains an abundance of Sanskrit words that are not used in everyday speech.  These words were added during the 19th century to differentiate the language from Urdu.  All of the sources that have been quoted are correct in my opinion.  Again, by referring to the "invention" of Hindi, the sources are not referring to the normal, everyday language, but the heavily Sanskritized literary one, which in modern times includes both Sanskrit equivalents of Perso-Arabic words and translations of English terms.  These Sanskrit formations in some cases were a natural part of spoken Sanskrit and in others they are artificial creations, such as "shubh ratri", which is a direct translation of the English phrase.
> 
> If you're interested in an example of this systematic replacement, here's one.  The shuddh Hindi word for 'if' is 'yadi'.  This word was used in Sanskrit and may have existed in Hindi to some degree before 1800, but the common colloquial term in Hindi was and still is 'agar', which is a Persian word.  Yet, shuddh Hindi preferentially chooses to use the word 'yadi' even though not too many people use it in speech.  It was words such as these that were stressed or added to shuddh Hindi from the 19th century onwards, where as such an emphasis did not exist before this time.


A lot of "Shuddh Hindi" vocabulary is a direct translation of the Urdu terms. I wonder if "shubh raatri" has come from "shab ba-xair" [raat xair se (guzre)]. Another example is "shubh-chintak" for the Urdu "xair-andesh" [(aap kaa) achchhaa sochne vaalaa]


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## greatbear

QURESHPOR said:


> The language prior to its transformation at Fort William College, where it was put through a sieve to remove words of Arabic and Persian origins, was nothing but the Urdu that had taken centuries to get to that stage.



So, according to you, "mansik"/"manasik" was used only since 18th century, and all Hindustani speakers were using "zehni" instead, right? Give a clear answer, QP: you cannot repeat the same arguments again and again without side-stepping all those questions which you find uncomfortable to answer.
In case you again try to make us lose track of the arguments among your Macgregors, "manasik" isn't Urdu and, and also but, it is Hindi and it is Hindustani. Also, there are hundreds and hundreds of words like this: not some sprinklings.



QURESHPOR said:


> The ousted words were replaced by words of Sanskrit origins but one slight problem arose. And to obtain the ultimate "shuddhataa" one would of course need to remove the word "Hindi" too!!



Ah yes, just like one would have to remove the word "Urdu" (from Turkish) too from Urdu vocabulary, if one were to adopt such a line.


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## gagun

I THINK split was due to only bad thinking of politicians.but people of India speaks different accents and dialects of Urdu/Hindustani in different regions.


I WANT GIVE SOME info about DECCAN _PLATEAU_
In Nijaam's reign of Hyderabad, first 'Persian' was strictly declared as state language later it was replaced by Deccani.in this reign local people's languages like Telugu,Marathi,Kannada were strictly prohibited to speak in schools,courts and gov places.If the people of this Deccan region want to start a school to teach in Telugu they should take permission from Nijaam.

even though people of this region love DeccanI as much as their mother tongue due to it's sweetness.


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## Wolverine9

QURESHPOR said:


> Similar descriptions have been used for Urdu elsewhere in the forum. It would be nice to post one or two examples of this "heavily persianised" form of Urdu.



For example, just as Hindi often emphasizes the word 'agni' for fire, Urdu often emphasizes 'aatish' and sometimes 'naar'.  However, the common word in Hindustani was and still is 'aag'.  Constructs of the form "___-e-___", which are common in Persian, have become more commonplace in Urdu over the last century or so.  In recent times, new technologies, scientific terms, etc. are given a Persianized form (eg. television; Urdu: duur numaaii, Hindi: duur darshan). Moreover, famous poets like Ghalib do use Persian vocabulary that are not commonly heard in daily speech.  Similarly, films like Mughal-e-Azam do the same.  Perhaps in these two cases it has more to do with the time or setting they were in.

This quote posted by tonyspeed in post#75 adds to what I was saying: 

"But though  such words are freely used in the spoken vernacular and in  its works  written in the Devanagari character, they are much more  frequent in  Urdu...
and Persian models have throughout supplied inspiration to  Indian  writers. In this idiom the same abuse in manifest as in the  so-called  High Hindi; writers, to
display their learning, have  rejected vernacular forms of common use in  favour of less known Persian  terms, as in the latter recourse has been  had to Sanskrit"


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## tonyspeed

greatbear said:


> Also, Muslims did invade the Indian subcontinent, and also imposed their religion and languages on us:


  Sanskrit is nothing other than a dialect of Old Persian. When you realise that, you will realise the bickering over what is Persian and what is Sanskrit makes absolutely no sense.   

There were already Muslim traders in Hindustan long before there were Muslim invaders in Hindustan.  The creator of the Hindi language as we know it were the traders not the invaders. That "invasion" argument is nothing but a filty, nasty poisonous ideology created by politicians to divide. 

There was no "us" or "we" in pre-modern Hindustan. It was a region filled with various kingdoms that did also "invade" one another. Remember Ashok who after violently "invading" everyone around him turned to Buddhism? He also "imposed" Buddhism on the people he ruled.


----------



## Wolverine9

tonyspeed said:


> Sanskrit is nothing other than a dialect of Old Persian.



What?  Was this statement made in jest?  Neither is a dialect of the other.  They are related languages, with both ultimately derived from Proto Indo-Iranian.


----------



## tonyspeed

Wolverine9 said:


> It was only after the Mughal influence declined that the Perso-Arabic script started to lose its appeal among many speakers of the language.  Devanagari then entered and filled the void.



According to Rai, there were always sections of Hindustan that used a form of Devanagari, notably Madhya Pradesh and Bihar. According to his book, It was really the Uttar Pradesh region where the use of Persian script was most entrenched and those trying to institute Devanagari as the official script met the most resistance from the middle class.

It should also be noted that Devanagari did not just "fill the void". Persian script was forcefully removed by the British at the behest of political jockiers. At the time, Urdu script was still very much the script used by the educated middle class in the North Western Provinces and Oudh (Modern UP). 


Rai sees the war of 1857 as the turning point. In that war, the "rebels", which included both Hindus and Muslims, proclaimed Bahadur Shah, against his will, the Emporer of Hindustan and fought the British (Surely, you've heard of Jhansi Ki Rani). At the same time certain Muslim leaders called for Jihad against the British. These two combined facts caused the British to primarily lay the blame for the rebellion upon the Muslims. So when the British Raj began after the war, official policy reflected that new-born suspicion of Muslims. 

At the same time, the number of Hindi schools came to far outnumber the number of Urdu schools. So as more and more people graduated from Hindi school, but were unable to obtain government jobs because Urdu was the offical language of the government, more and more pressure was but on the Raj to get rid of Persian Script.


----------



## tonyspeed

Wolverine9 said:


> What?  Was this statement made in jest?  Neither is a dialect of the other.  They are related languages, with both ultimately derived from Proto Indo-Iranian.




One man's dialect is another man's language. The bottom line is Sanskrit and Old Persian are two peas in one pod. Brothers of the same family.


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## Wolverine9

tonyspeed said:


> According to Rai, there were always sections of Hindustan that used a form of Devanagari, notably Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.



Did they use Devanagari to write Khari Boli or their regional languages?



tonyspeed said:


> One man's dialect is another man's language.  The bottom line is Sanskrit and Old Persian are two peas in one pod.  Brothers of the same family.



It's important to use the correct terminology, though.  Otherwise, it's linguistically inaccurate.


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## Qureshpor

Wolverine9 said:


> For example, just as Hindi often emphasizes the word 'agni' for fire, Urdu often emphasizes 'aatish' and sometimes 'naar'.  However, the common word in Hindustani was and still is 'aag'.  Constructs of the form "___-e-___", which are common in Persian, have become more commonplace in Urdu over the last century or so.  In recent times, new technologies, scientific terms, etc. are given a Persianized form (eg. television; Urdu: duur numaaii, Hindi: duur darshan). Moreover, famous poets like Ghalib do use Persian vocabulary that are not commonly heard in daily speech.  Similarly, films like Mughal-e-Azam do the same.  Perhaps in these two cases it has more to do with the time or setting they were in.


I was hoping you or someone else would quote a piece of prose or verse or even a recording of speech to demonstrate the occurrence of this "highly persianized Urdu". I would suggest that in Urdu daily speech you will find only aag. In poetry, you will find aag, aatash (this is the correct word) and to a much lesser extent "naar". A couple of examples from Ghalib, a poet known as "mushkil-pasand".

3ishq par zor nahiiN, hai yih vuh aatash Ghalib
kih lagaa'e nah lage aur bujhaa'e nah bane

raat ko aag aur din ko dhuup
bhaaR meN jaa'eN aise lail-o-nahaar

I have always heard and read "Television" and never "duur-numaa'ii"!!


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## greatbear

gagun said:


> In Nijaam's reign of Hyderabad, first 'Persian' was strictly declared as state language later it was replaced by Deccani.in this reign local people's languages like Telugu,Marathi,Kannada were strictly prohibited to speak in schools,courts and gov places.If the people of this Deccan region want to start a school to teach in Telugu they should take permission from Nijaam.



Welcome, Gagun, to the forum! It's nice to finally have a member who speaks Deccani and be able to get his perspectives here. The myriad accents, vocabularies and dialects of India are often in the danger of being marginalized on these forums in favour of some elitist perspective, so it's good to have you here.


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## greatbear

tonyspeed said:


> One man's dialect is another man's language. The bottom line is Sanskrit and Old Persian are two peas in one pod. Brothers of the same family.



No; one man's dialect is not another man's language. Sanskrit and Old Persian are sisters, derived from one source. You should exercise some care before making such irresponsible statements.



tonyspeed said:


> The creator of the Hindi language as we know it were the traders not the invaders.



Fanciful thinking. See Gagun's post (no. 87) for a sample of how languages were imposed on Indian speakers. In contrast, English was in fact never imposed on us: it was simply an incentive for many Indians as a vehicle to a better life. Of course, with Muslim rulers too, the same incentive was there to a certain extent: since if you speak the ruler's language well, it is always good.


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## Wolverine9

Let's avoid discussion about religion and invasions, everyone.  It's controversial, unnecessary, and doesn't really address the topic of this thread in a constructive way, in my opinion.


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## greatbear

^ I don't see how we are discussing religions, Wolverine. But as far as invasions and imposition of values and languages are concerned, we need to discuss them, since some people keep on harping about the "ShuddhikaraN" of Hindi. If that was ever done at any level, then, irrespective of whether that ShuddhikaraN was justified or not, the reason behind lay it in imposition of foreign elements on us. It was a feeling of "back to our heritage" that prompted people to go to Sanskrit and its derived forms, and not some draconian laws imposed by some Nizaam or some Mughal ruler. It is important to recognise that if there is some movement towards Shuddh Hindi, then most Hindi speakers are doing so with their own consent and free will.

As long as Shuddh Hindi will keep coming up in the argument, it will be unavoidable to bring in the need to go to it, which were Muslim invasions of the subcontinent. We are talking of history - the title of the thread is "Origin of the Division" - and history cannot be discussed by shying away from facts, from what did happen.


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## gagun

QURESHPOR said:


> "So, by the time the "invading Muslims" were writing works in Urdu, Braj, Awadhi and other languages, they were part of settled communities just like the "invading Aryans" who wrote works such as Mahabharata and Shakuntala." QP
> 
> There is nothing substantive in post 69 but the contents of the second paragraph, irrelevant as they are, are also most unfortunate. Human beings have been invading lands once Lucy, a hominid, moved out of Africa. When India's land mass broke away from Africa's, there were no Sanskrit speaking individuals on it already when this land mass collided with Asia. We know Dravidians were already there all over India, not just in the south, before the arrival of the Aryans. Even today there are pockets of Dravidian people known as Brahui (Brohi) who speak a Dravidian language, in Baluchistan, Pakistan.
> 
> Concerning the "imposition of religion and languages" by the "invading Muslims", all I can say is that hundreds of millions of the natives who managed to remain non-Muslim and non-Urdu speaking must have swum across to Sri Lanka (building a bridge would have taken too long) and stayed there. By the time they swam back, Europeans had arrived there who forced them to speak English, Portuguese and French and converted them to Christianity! But there is still a mystery! How come there are millions and millions of non-Muslims in India still AND speaking languages other than Urdu!?
> 
> Edit: I just wish to add that I neither brought history nor religion into this thread. Further to this, the "invading Muslims" did not speak Urdu!



yes.inavding muslims who migrated to india were about 1 to 2% and they did not speak urdu or hindi or hindusatani


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## marrish

greatbear said:


> As long as Shuddh Hindi will keep coming up in the argument, it will be unavoidable to bring in the need to go to it, which were Muslim invasions of the subcontinent. We are talking of history - the title of the thread is "Origin of the Division" - and history cannot be discussed by shying away from facts, from what did happen.


Perhaps it would be possible to avoid sliding down with the mud and derailing yet another thread. This thread has reached so far thanks to the patience and hard work of many people, despite the controversial sounding topic. Religion and any historical invasions are just totally irrelevant to the topic, which is *language*! Also bringing in the term shuddhikaran (I believe it is the very first time I see this term in the forum) appears to be politically tinted as it has also been used in the context of religious conversion. 

Please let's finish the futile discussions about invasions dating over a thousand years ago, the Divide of Urdu and Hindi doesn't really have such a long history.


----------



## tonyspeed

greatbear said:


> It was a feeling of "back to our heritage" that prompted people to go to Sanskrit and its derived forms, and not some draconian laws imposed by some Nizaam or some Mughal ruler.



The Sanskritization of Hindi began at the behest of the English. Christendom evangelizers were some of the foremost promoters of a different language for Hindus and Muslims which they used in their literature. So there was little Indian element in this at all.

Sanskrit never ever went away under Mughal rule. It was in the domain of the Brahmins. The other castes did not use Sanskrit nor were they taught Sanskrit. It was the English that pushed the original Sanskrit forms back into the Hindi.

Before that there was a system of peaceful coexistence between the colloquial tongues  and the learned tongue dating far back into Indian history.

So the use of "our" here confuses me unless you are talking about Brahmins only.


----------



## greatbear

tonyspeed said:


> The Sanskritization of Hindi began at the behest of the English. Christendom evangelizers were some of the foremost promoters of a different language for Hindus and Muslims which they used in their literature. So there was little Indian element in this at all.
> 
> Sanskrit never ever went away under Mughal rule. It was in the domain of the Brahmins. The other castes did not use Sanskrit nor were they taught Sanskrit. It was the English that pushed the original Sanskrit forms back into the Hindi.



So, you imagine that non-Brahmins had no idea that what did the name of the place where they lived, as for example MaNikaraN (maNi + karaN), mean? Quite laughable.


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## tonyspeed

I have found a beautiful description of Hindi and Urdu in:

*The Languages of India: Being a Reprint of the Chapter on Languages*

 By Sir George Abraham Grierson

http://books.google.com/books?id=L65DAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA83&lpg=PA83#v=onepage&q&f=false


The book is freely available in pdf form.


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## insouciantguru

Interesting discussion. 

Some general thoughts:

I think another problem with this debate is that it is perhaps being discussed through the limiting narrative of divergence solely from Hindustani-Khari Boli, which basically has its provenance in and around Delhi and western UP. It is around these areas that Urdu/ Hindustani developed.

What the above analysis seems to overlook is the influence of the various Hindustani dialects spoken natively in places like Rajasthan, Bihar (Maithalli-spoken also in Nepal), Madhya Pradesh (not counting their extremely diverging dialects of course). Many speakers in Bihar and MP have always said (including many of the illiterate and uneducated): _bhat_ not _chaval_ (rice), _kathin_ not _mushkil _(difficult), _kesh_ not _baal_ (hair) (This I have heard in deep interiors), _keval_ not _sirf_ (only) and there are countless other examples. What I’m trying to say is that whilst it is certainly true that Sanskritized formalised written Hindi is a post 19th century phenomenon, the picture is hardly as straightforward when it comes to the language in the spoken form, for many native Hindi speakers- all the broad dialects- in India- _especially in parts and communities where there was comparatively less penetration of perso-arabic words for myriad sociological reasons_,- have retained their Pre-sanskritized Sanskrit-based vocabulary. This is independent of the Sanskrit based neologisms inserted into Hindustani much later, which shaped modern Hindi's formal register.


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## Wolverine9

On page 86 there are a few interesting sentences in particular:

"Urdu prose came into existence as a literary medium at the beginning of the last century in Calcutta. Like Hindi prose it was due to English influence and to the need of text books in both forms of Hindostani for the College of Fort William. The Bagh o Bahar of Mir Amman and the Khirad Afroz of Hafizu ddin Ahmad are familiar examples of the earlier of these works in Urdu as the already mentioned Prem Sagar written by Lallu Lai is an example of those in Hindi."


----------



## marrish

insouciantguru said:


> Interesting discussion.
> 
> Some general thoughts:
> 
> I think another problem with this debate is that it is perhaps being discussed through the limiting narrative of divergence solely from Hindustani-Khari Boli, which basically has its provenance in and around Delhi and western UP. It is around these areas that Urdu/ Hindustani developed.
> 
> *What the above analysis seems to overlook is the influence of the various Hindustani dialects spoken natively in places like Rajasthan, Bihar (Maithalli-spoken also in Nepal), Madhya Pradesh (not counting their extremely diverging dialects of course). Many speakers in Bihar and MP have always said (including many of the illiterate and uneducated): bhat not chaval (rice), kathin not mushkil (difficult), kesh not baal (hair) (This I have heard in deep interiors), keval not sirf (only) and there are countless other examples. What I’m trying to say is that whilst it is certainly true that Sanskritized formalised written Hindi is a post 19th century phenomenon, the picture is hardly as straightforward when it comes to the language in the spoken form, for many native Hindi speakers- all the broad dialects- in India- especially in parts and communities where there was comparatively less penetration of perso-arabic words for myriad sociological reasons,- have retained their Pre-sanskritized Sanskrit-based vocabulary. This is independent of the Sanskrit based neologisms inserted into Hindustani much later, which shaped modern Hindi's formal register.*



At the first sight I agree with your thoughts. A confirmation of what you are saying is that _kaThin_ is still used freely in Urdu!


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## tonyspeed

Wolverine9 said:


> On page 86 there are a few interesting sentences in particular:
> 
> "Urdu prose came into existence as a literary medium at the beginning of the last century in Calcutta. Like Hindi prose it was due to English influence and to the need of text books in both forms of Hindostani for the College of Fort William. The Bagh o Bahar of Mir Amman and the Khirad Afroz of Hafizu ddin Ahmad are familiar examples of the earlier of these works in Urdu as the already mentioned Prem Sagar written by Lallu Lai is an example of those in Hindi."



This should be taken with a grain of salt. Prose in India was popularised by the British. South Asians in older times prefered verse. So Urdu as a poetic written language had existed far before FWC.


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## insouciantguru

marrish said:


> At the first sight I agree with your thoughts. A confirmation of what you are saying is that _kaThin_ is still used freely in Urdu!



And there are so many others like it, Maarish Sahab. I find it a little reductive to continue this language-divergence debate solely on the basis that Khari Boli is the one and only fountainhead. Even if Urdu was moulded solely in the Dilli ki Khari Boli crucible, Hindi would have pulled on its roots from branches reaching far afield, as it continues to this day in one form or another. I don't buy the notion that the dialects of Bihar, South East Nepal, Rajasthan and MP  would not have affected everyday spoken Hindustani and imbued its vocabulary. My point being, the everyday spoken Hindi dialect in all of these states is much more Sanskrit-based than was the UP ki Khari Boli that eventually came to dominate, and remains so.


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## Qureshpor

But the thread topic is why Urdu and Hindi became separate languages. People may disagree on the foundation (khaRii Bolii Prakrit) but the truth of the matter is that both Urdu and Modern Hindi have the one and the same fountainhead and this is what you will read in practically all if not all scholarly works.. This we can think of as the basic structure of the building (Urdu and Hindi). The decoration of the house (in terms of mainly but not exclusively additional vocabulary) gives the languages or buildings a different appearance. In terms of the generic term "Hindi", of course there were other fully fledged Prakrits like Braj, Awadhi, Bhojpuri etc. These and others would naturally have affected both these buildings to a smaller or greater extent but the framework (DhaaNchaa) of both is still KhaRii-Bolii. How the river of Urdu* became two tributaries (Urdu and Modern Hindi) is the subject of this thread.

*I should add that Urdu has been known as Hindi, Hindvi, Gojri, Dakkani, zabaan-i-Urdu-i-mu3alaa before finally becoming simply Urdu. With all these names it has always been written with the Urdu alphabet.


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## Wolverine9

I've read that the usage of Sanskrit vocabulary in Modern Hindi, especially early on, was particularly modeled on the patterns found in Awadhi and Braj.  Bengali and perhaps Marathi also played a role in how Sanskrit vocabulary was incorporated.


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## insouciantguru

Yes, the source is KhaRi-Boli without a shadow of a doubt, but as far as their _spoken_ forms are concerned-as opposed to their written avatars-there's more than a small chance that the two tributaries quickly gathered very many subtle differences from very far back for one simple reason: many of the native Hindi speakers of all the broad dialects in India- especially in parts outside UP (i.e. MP, Rajasthan, Bihar and Nepal for instance who've immigrated in vast numbers over time to the birthplace of Hindi/Urdu) and other communities (even within the Delhi-UP region) where there was comparatively less penetration of Perso-Arabic words for myriad sociological reasons- have retained their Pre-formally sanskritized albeit Sanskrit/Prakrit based vocabulary. I mean caste, religion et al surely would have have played a significant role as to how people spoke, as still does today. Apparently I've read that the Kayasth caste was particularly proficient in Persian and Urdu as they worked as Mughal scribes.

I imagine this was much less the case with the evolution of Urdu. This is of course my general opinion and if there is evidence either in support or against this theory that would be interesting.


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## marrish

^ Awadhi and other languages/dialects, especially in their older forms which might have been of importance at the time of the rise and spread of Urdu, should be seen in the perspective of Prakrit but not Sanskrit based vocabulary.


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## Wolverine9

Sanskrit loans have been freely incorporated into the New Indo-Aryan languages throughout their histories, including Braj and Awadhi (cf. the works of Tulsidas).  This was less so for Urdu because of its association with Persian and Mughal culture.  When Modern Hindi was developed, Braj and Awadhi had a strong influence on the usage of Sanskrit words.


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## marrish

Why not, why not. Anyway, as an example, the prakritic/Urdu word for a circle is chaak, chakkar or chakkaa not the Sanskrit chakra. I hope you know what I mean.


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## Wolverine9

Perhaps others can weigh in on this, but I think chakkar or chakr are much more common in Hindi.


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## insouciantguru

Wolverine9 said:


> Perhaps others can weigh in on this, but I think chakkar or chakr are much more common in Hindi.



Yes. But in the more formal register you'd say chakra.


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## greatbear

QURESHPOR said:


> How the river of Urdu* became two tributaries (Urdu and Modern Hindi) is the subject of this thread.



If that were true, it is very strange that none of the words for a "curious person" in Urdu are recognizable by any Hindi speaker: to give just one _more_ example. I perfectly agree with insouciantguru: Hindi has not khari boli as its sole fountainhead. Hindi has been spread over a large area over a long period of time, with attendant interplay of politics, migrations and climatic factors: only a person with vested interests would believe khari boli as the fountainhead for Hindi. That khari boli is the sole (rather, major) mother might be largely true for Urdu, being a language limited in terms of area and communities, number of speakers and preferences (i.e., much preferring to take loans from Persian-Arabic rather than Indic languages) when compared particularly with Hindi.

Just because a scholar calls day as night doesn't make day night: any Indian who has travelled across India, especially gone into the interiors, will be struck with the vocabulary used in interiors and also similarities of Sanskrit-based vocab between Hindi and other languages like Gujarati, Kannada, etc. - to suggest that there's no anterior connection is like seeing each backwater of the Vembanad as a different sea in itself.


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## tonyspeed

QURESHPOR said:


> How the river of Urdu* became two tributaries (Urdu and Modern Hindi) is the subject of this thread.



For clarity and understandibility, there are two Urdus. One Urdu is literary Urdu and one Urdu is common Urdu, called Hindustani by the English, but in reality was Khari Boli. 

Khari Boli is a spoken dialect of everyday usage (literacy not required). 
Urdu is a written language of poetry and prose.

Until we make and understand this clear distinction, one can never understand the actual history.

By using the same word for both the spoken and the written language, one paints a distorted picture of the history to the uninitiated and, possibly, even misleads oneself over time.

The same problem is evident with Hindi.

Kharii Bolii is a spoken dialect of everyday usage (literacy not required).
Hindi is a written language of prose and poetry.

By using the same word for both, one becomes utterly confused as to the truth.


Literary languages are stuffed full of external borrowings to express ideas where the words are not available
in the common language or to make some sort of distinction between common speech and scientific, poetic language.
When a population is mostly uneducated, the vocabulary of the literary language is very divergent from the spoken language. As populations become more literate, that gap closes.  In the mean time, words coined in the written language
can begin to find their way back into the spoken language over time. In the modern-age with audio-visual media, this
infiltration is often quicker because unfamiliar words have the opportunity to spread quickly, even to the illiterate.


Looking back at the history, we can say that there was one spoken dialect of a region of Delhi. This spoken dialect spawned two different modes of written expression over time. Urdu was the first such literary form; however, in the early days, the written Urdu method of expression varied from writer to writer. It's standardisation started informally in the 1700s and formally at FWC. Hindi was a second literary language invented at FWC for the purpose of prose (intended for a Hindu audience), based on the same basic grammar of the spoken dialect of that region of Delhi.

That being said, the split of the written languages (which became written standards once legitimised by the British Raj) and the adoption of the written Hindi language invented at FWC has *also* created two styles of spoken dialect, when there was only one. This is inevitable as both written languages exert influence on the spoken language of the general populace. So in fact, we can talk about, three dialects (spoken forms) and two literary languages (grammarians know language is a standard that is actually spoken in dialects).

Written Languages: 

1) Urdu (informal standardisation began in the 1700s)
2) Hindi (created and standardised starting in 1800)


Spoken dialects:

1) Original uneducated Khari Boli dialect
2) Khari Boli dialect that is only Urdu influenced
3) Khari Boli that is Urdu and Hindi influenced

(I am here ignoring dialect difference that may spring up because of the separation between Urdu in India and Urdu in Pakistan)

Keeping the term used for the spoken dialect separate from the term used for the written standard is important in understanding that 1) written Urdu did NOT spawn written Hindi. 2) Spoken language and the written standard are not identical but they influence each other. The spoken language is the raw material upon which a literary standard is created. Once created, the literary standard can in-turn influence the spoken language.


Post-Script:

Khari Boli is a just one dialect in a broad range of spoken dialects grouped, once again, under the broad, unfortunate term Hindi. Before the political favour was given to Kharii Bolii (upon which the Hindi and Urdu written languages were standardised) other dialects had political favour such as Braj Bhashaa (a spoken language and a language of influential poetry). In the pre-standardisation period, all of these dialects would have influenced each other through the spread of poetry and physical interaction - included would be dialects we now view as separate languages (Gujarati and Panjabi). For example, Kabir's writings show influence from Khari Boli, Avadhi, Bhojpuri, and Braj Bhasha all at the same time.


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## Wolverine9

^ Good explanation, but I don't really understand the part about the 3  spoken dialects.  What is the original, uneducated Khari Boli?  Where on  the dialect continuum between Hindi and Urdu is it?  Why do you feel  that there is a dialect that is _only _Urdu influenced and one that is _both _Urdu and Hindi influenced?


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## marrish

I  don't understand it on the same point as Wolverine9 but I appreciate this summation with which I tend to agree. At least TS agrees that the basis of both languages was KhaRi bolii.


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## Qureshpor

tonyspeed said:


> [...] Sanskrit never ever went away under Mughal rule. It was in the domain of the Brahmins. The other castes did not use Sanskrit nor were they taught Sanskrit. It was the English that pushed the original Sanskrit forms back into the Hindi.
> 
> Before that there was a system of peaceful coexistence between the colloquial tongues and the learned tongue dating far back into Indian history.
> 
> So the use of "our" here confuses me unless you are talking about Brahmins only.



You make a valid point. Some of these unfortunate souls were n't allowed to hear the Sanskrit scriptures let alone be allowed to learn to read and write the language. No wonder it (Sanskrit) died a certain death.


----------



## Qureshpor

tonyspeed said:


> For clarity and understandibility, there are two Urdus. One Urdu is literary Urdu and one Urdu is common Urdu, called Hindustani by the English, but in reality was Khari Boli.


I don’t quite know what you mean by common Urdu because there are people whose spoken Urdu is not much different from literary Urdu. And they are not just those in this Forum. The concept of Hindustani is no longer relevant as the term is dead and buried. There are no doubt registers within both Urdu and Hindi but Hindustani is n’t one of them. If you do a bit of research into this term, it precedes British usage. However, I agree with you that it was popularised by the British.



tonyspeed said:


> Khari Boli is a spoken dialect of everyday usage (literacy not required).


Is the spoken “KhaRii-Bolii” still around in its original form without the Perso-Arabic infusion?


tonyspeed said:


> Looking back at the history, we can say that there was one spoken dialect of a region of Delhi. This spoken dialect spawned two different modes of written expression over time. Urdu was the first such literary form; however, in the early days, the written Urdu method of expression varied from writer to writer. It's standardisation started informally in the 1700s and formally at FWC. Hindi was a second literary language invented at FWC for the purpose of prose (intended for a Hindu audience), based on the same basic grammar of the spoken dialect of that region of Delhi.





tonyspeed said:


> Written Languages:
> 
> 1) Urdu (informal standardisation began in the 1700s)
> 2) Hindi (created and standardised starting in 1800)


Regarding the written form, would you be able to tell us when KhaRii-Bolii first began to be written in Devanagri? Are you taking into account the Nagri PrachaariNRi Sabhaa? Could you please provide some details for the “informal” standardization of Urdu and the “formal” standardization at Fort William College?


tonyspeed said:


> [...]Keeping the term used for the spoken dialect separate from the term used for the written standard is important in understanding that 1) written Urdu did NOT spawn written Hindi.


My understanding is that written Urdu did “spawn” written Hindi (at Fort William College)


tonyspeed said:


> Spoken dialects:
> 1) Original uneducated Khari Boli dialect
> 2) Khari Boli dialect that is only Urdu influenced
> 3) Khari Boli that is Urdu and Hindi influenced


Do you mean Urdu for the first one and “Colloquial Hindi” for the second one? 

I agree that the generic term “Hindi” is most unfortunate as it creates more confusion than clarity. I believe if the term Hindustani (written in the Latin alphabet) had been agreed upon between the antagonists as early as the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, we would not be in this linguistic mess that we find ourselves now and we would be able to discuss language matters in a civilised manner as other language speakers manage to do without too much trouble! 

After all this, how is this linked to "Hindi-Urdu: Origin of the Division""?


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## tonyspeed

QURESHPOR said:


> I don’t quite know what you mean by common Urdu because there are people whose spoken Urdu is not much different from literary Urdu. And they are not just those in this Forum. The concept of Hindustani is no longer relevant as the term is dead and buried. There are no doubt registers within both Urdu and Hindi but Hindustani is n’t one of them. If you do a bit of research into this term, it precedes British usage. However, I agree with you that it was popularised by the British.
> 
> Is the spoken “KhaRii-Bolii” still around in its original form without the Perso-Arabic infusion?
> 
> 
> Regarding the written form, would you be able to tell us when KhaRii-Bolii first began to be written in Devanagri? Are you taking into account the Nagri PrachaariNRi Sabhaa? Could you please provide some details for the “informal” standardization of Urdu and the “formal” standardization at Fort William College?
> 
> My understanding is that written Urdu did “spawn” written Hindi (at Fort William College)
> 
> Do you mean Urdu for the first one and “Colloquial Hindi” for the second one?
> 
> I agree that the generic term “Hindi” is most unfortunate as it creates more confusion than clarity. I believe if the term Hindustani (written in the Latin alphabet) had been agreed upon between the antagonists as early as the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, we would not be in this linguistic mess that we find ourselves now and we would be able to discuss language matters in a civilised manner as other language speakers manage to do without too much trouble!
> 
> After all this, how is this linked to "Hindi-Urdu: Origin of the Division""?





1) Is the spoken “KhaRii-Bolii” still around in its original form without the Perso-Arabic infusion?

I think you mistunderstand me. There has been Perso-Arabic infusion in the many dialects of Hindustani from at least the middle-ages. However, Perso-Arabic infusion is not the same as educated speech.
When I say khaRii Bolii I mean in the uneducated form.


2) Regarding the written form, would you be able to tell us when KhaRii-Bolii first began to be written in Devanagri? 
The first known writing in Devanagri of a dialect of Hindustani would have been a Sanskrit writing explaining the grammar of the Avadhi dialect. Another script called Kaithi, which is related in form to Dev-nagari also dominated accounts keeping by certain castes. It is also my understanding that Dev-nagari was used in Madhya Pradesh. 

As far as the Kharii Boli dialect goes, Perso-Arabic script seems to have dominated as the area where it was spoken was the seat(s) of Mughal power. (KhaRii Boli was only spoken in a very small area of the Hindi-dialect belt in a portion of the Hindi-dialect belt). Perso-Arabic writing also seemed to dominate in Uttar Pradesh before the 1800s.

This is explained (although somewhat unclearly) in the book by Alok Rai. The Hindi/Urdu script contraversy was only a contraversy in certain parts of the Hindi Belt, notably UP and Delhi.

3) Do you mean Urdu for the first one and “Colloquial Hindi” for the second one? 
No and no. 

I am illustrating the point that the spoken language is different from the written language. Today, from our vantage 
point there seems to be no difference, but there was a difference. We can say that, yes, the colloquial uneducated
KhaRii Bolii did have words of Perso-Arabic origin even in 1600, but we cannot say that the uneducated KhaRii Bolii
was the same as, for example, the language of Ghalib or the language of Kabir. Such writers added additional educated words (from Persian) that helped to define what we know as educated, written Urdu. 

After time, some of these educated Urdu words then trickled back down into the common vernacular.
But, while the educated language is being defined, there will always be a separation between written and spoken speech.
And even then, at the high levels, written and spoken speech may still differ markedly in vocabulary. 

Such a difference will persist for a while when there are low levels of education and a dearth of non-written media (tv, radio) for spreading educated speech.

4) My understanding is that written Urdu did “spawn” written Hindi (at Fort William College)

I am not understanding your meaning here. Written KhaRii Boli in Devanagarii script (for the purpose of prose) was invented at FWC. What does Urdu have to do with this?


----------



## Qureshpor

> tonyspeed said:
> 
> 
> 
> 1) Is the spoken “KhaRii-Bolii” still around in its original form without the Perso-Arabic infusion?
> 
> I think you mistunderstand me. There has been Perso-Arabic infusion in the many dialects of Hindustani from at least the middle-ages. However, Perso-Arabic infusion is not the same as educated speech.
> When I say khaRii Bolii I mean in the uneducated form.
> 
> 
> 
> OK, is KhaRii-Bolii, with Perso-Arabic infusion but that which does not qualify as being Urdu, still being spoken by uneducated people?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 2) Regarding the written form, would you be able to tell us when KhaRii-Bolii first began to be written in Devanagri?
> The first known writing in Devanagri of a dialect of Hindustani would have been a Sanskrit writing explaining the grammar of the Avadhi dialect. Another script called Kaithi, which is related in form to Dev-nagari also dominated accounts keeping by certain castes. It is also my understanding that Dev-nagari was used in Madhya Pradesh.
> 
> As far as the Kharii Boli dialect goes, Perso-Arabic script seems to have dominated as the area where it was spoken was the seat(s) of Mughal power. (KhaRii Boli was only spoken in a very small area of the Hindi-dialect belt in a portion of the Hindi-dialect belt). Perso-Arabic writing also seemed to dominate in Uttar Pradesh before the 1800s.
> 
> This is explained (although somewhat unclearly) in the book by Alok Rai. The Hindi/Urdu script contraversy was only a contraversy in certain parts of the Hindi Belt, notably UP and Delhi.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> I don’t regard “Avadhi” as a dialect of “Hindustani”. Avadhi stands at the same level as KhaRii-Bolii, Braj and Bhojpuri etc in terms of distinct vernaculars. You have n’t answered my question. Do you know when KhaRii-Bolii was first written in Devanagri?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 3) Do you mean Urdu for the first one and “Colloquial Hindi” for the second one?
> No and no.
> 
> I am illustrating the point that the spoken language is different from the written language. Today, from our vantage
> point there seems to be no difference, but there was a difference. We can say that, yes, the colloquial uneducated
> KhaRii Bolii did have words of Perso-Arabic origin even in 1600, but we cannot say that the uneducated KhaRii Bolii
> was the same as, for example, the language of Ghalib or the language of Kabir. Such writers added additional educated words (from Persian) that helped to define what we know as educated, written Urdu.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> I thought that the main language Kabir wrote in was not KhaRii-Bolii but Avadhi. As for Ghalib’s language, one can hardly compare the beginnings of Urdu (in KhaRii-Bolii) to its zenith (in Ghalib’s language).
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 4) My understanding is that written Urdu did “spawn” written Hindi (at Fort William College)
> 
> I am not understanding your meaning here. Written KhaRii Boli in Devanagarii script (for the purpose of prose) was invented at FWC. What does Urdu have to do with this?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> See Post 53
> 
> Chatterji's view was a newer version of the thesis advanced by Dr. Tara Chand, to the effect that: They [the "Hindi" authors at the College of Fort William] found a way out *by adopting the language of Mir amman, [Sher Ali] Afsos*, and others by excising Arabic/Persian words from it, replacing them with those of Sanskrit and Hindi [Braj etc]. Thus within a space of less than ten years, two new languages...were decked out and presented [before the public] at the behest of the foreigner... Both were look alikes in form and structure, but their faces were turned away from each other..and from that day to this, we are wandering directionless, on two paths".”
> 
> See Post 59
> 
> Mr. F. E. Keay, the author of A History of Hindi Literature, Heritage of India series
> 
> Urdu however, had a vocabulary borrowed largely from the Persian and Arabic languages, which were specially connected with Muhammadanism. A literary language for Hindi-speaking people which could commend itself more to Hindus was very desirable, *and the result was obtained by taking Urdu and expelling from it words of Persian and Arabic origin, and substituting for them words of Sanskrit or Hindi origin*."
Click to expand...


----------



## Wolverine9

McGregor thoroughly describes the history of Hindi in his book about Hindi literature.

It's quite interesting.


----------



## tonyspeed

QURESHPOR said:


> Chatterji's view was a newer version of the thesis advanced by Dr. Tara Chand, to the effect that: They [the "Hindi" authors at the College of Fort William] found a way out *by adopting the language of Mir amman, [Sher Ali] Afsos*, and others by excising Arabic/Persian words from it, replacing them with those of Sanskrit and *Hindi [Braj etc]*.



This quote is interesting considering I remember a claim before that Hindi is strictly Kharii Bolii and has no Braj influence.




QURESHPOR said:


> I  don’t regard “Avadhi” as a dialect of “Hindustani”. Avadhi stands at  the same level as KhaRii-Bolii, Braj and Bhojpuri etc in terms of  distinct vernaculars. You have n’t answered my question. Do you know  when KhaRii-Bolii was first written in Devanagri?




I think you should do some more research on what a dialect is. A language is an artificial standard. A dialect is what people actually speak. People do not speak a language unless they are learners.



QURESHPOR said:


> You have n’t answered my question. Do you know  when KhaRii-Bolii was first written in Devanagri?



I very clearly answered your question about Dev-nagari and KhaRii Bolii. I said 1800. But one should also remember that the Urdu prose standard has its beginngings in 1800 as well.



QURESHPOR said:


> *and  the result was obtained by taking Urdu and expelling from it words of  Persian and Arabic origin, and substituting for them words of Sanskrit  or Hindi origin*."



I think you take these quotations a bit too literally. Six of one is half-a-dozen of the other. The quote you posted about Hindi being taken from Urdu is obviously a biased statement. One easily could have said, Sanskrit and native words were used without even mentioning Urdu. Hindi cannot come from Urdu because they are both based on KhaRii Bolii which is separate from literary Urdu. Literary Urdu itself is a creation which did not exist at one point. The only reason the author chose to mention Urdu in the quote above is because literary Urdu predates literary Hindi. Sometimes one has to perceive what the author is trying to say and not take quotes out of context.



QURESHPOR said:


> I  thought that the main language Kabir wrote in was not KhaRii-Bolii but  Avadhi.



When I mentioned Kabir above, I meant Iqbal.


----------



## Qureshpor

tonyspeed said:


> This quote is interesting considering I remember a claim before that Hindi is strictly Kharii Bolii and has no Braj influence.


Urdu and Modern Hindi both have their basis on KhaRii-Bolii. There has not been any suggestions that no other language has played any part in Modern Hindi’s vocabulary build up. Taking words from a language such as Braj does not change Modern Hindi’s origins. They still remain KhaRii-Bolii



> I think you should do some more research on what a dialect is. A language is an artificial standard. A dialect is what people actually speak. People do not speak a language unless they are learners.


Thank you for your definition for “dialect” and “language”. Henceforth I shall try to refer to it. However, I shall not act upon it simply because I do not have any confidence in its accuracy!



> I very clearly answered your question about Dev-nagari and KhaRii Bolii. I said 1800. But one should also remember that the Urdu prose standard has its beginngings in 1800 as well.


Urdu prose’s history goes back a long time before 1804/5, in fact long time before even the foundation of Fort William College in 1781. Hazrat Gesudaraz Bandanawaz (1321-1422) is accredited with the oldest Deccani Urdu prose, a book called “Mi3raaju_l3aashiqiin”. Sab Ras by Mullah Vajhi was written in 1635.



> I think you take these quotations a bit too literally. Six of one is half-a-dozen of the other. The quote you posted about Hindi being taken from Urdu is obviously a biased statement. One easily could have said, Sanskrit and native words were used without even mentioning Urdu. Hindi cannot come from Urdu because they are both based on KhaRii Bolii which is separate from literary Urdu. Literary Urdu itself is a creation which did not exist at one point. The only reason the author chose to mention Urdu in the quote above is because literary Urdu predates literary Hindi. Sometimes one has to perceive what the author is trying to say and not take quotes out of context.


Both Dr. Tara Chand and Dr. Sunil Kumar Chatterji are Hindu writers, the former a graduate from Oxford and the latter graduate of Universities of Calcutta and London and considered the “Father of Indian linguistics”. They can hardly be called biased. 

“And finally, the verdict by Suniti Kumar Chatterji, often considered the father of Indian linguistics (again, reconverted from Urdu, cited in Gyanchand Jain, 1981):

“Historically and linguistically, Urdu is not an Islamic form of Hindi or Sankritized KhaRi Boli; the truth is to the contrary. Actually the Hindus adopted the Persianized Hindustani, which came into being in the royal court and its circles (we come across its beginning earlier in the Deccani tongue and in the Southern Muslim states of Ahmed Nagar, Bijapur and Golkonda). Since the Persian and the Arabic words were useless for them, they embraced the Devanagri script and Sanskritized the language, shunning the alien vocabulary of Persian and Arabic . . .. The above-mentioned theory that the Sanskritized Hindi was fashioned in the mode of Persianized Urdu was first proposed by Dr. Tarachand. I was against it then but now I admit that Tarachand was right.” (A Polyglot Nation and Its Linguistics, 1973)”

Regarding Mr. F. E. Keay M.A, the author of “A History of Hindi Literature”, here is a quote from R. P. Dewhurst writing in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society..

“This little book of 107 pages furnishes a very interesting and *sympathetic *summary of Hindi literature….”. This does not seem to indicate any bias for Urdu and I can’t think of any reason for such bias. 



> When I mentioned Kabir above, I meant Iqbal.


I personally can’t see any connection between Kabir and Iqbal, neither in time nor in space.

We seem to be heading towards 130 posts. *The answer to your opening post should have been the following and then we should all have called it a day.* What you and I have been saying in the last few posts does not add anything further to the “Origin of the Division”. It has, nevertheless, being a good platform to bring in scholarly input from a variety of sources.

*“Dr Alok Rai, who is considered an authority on the ‘Hindi-Urdu Controversy’, traced the controversy from the 19th century and explained how a controversy which began with the demand for a script (Nagari), developed into a language demand (Hindi) and further became a political demand splitting two communities apart (Hindu and Muslim) and culminated in the creation of two nations (India and Pakistan)."*


----------



## tonyspeed

QURESHPOR said:


> *“Dr Alok Rai, who is considered an authority on the ‘Hindi-Urdu Controversy’, traced the controversy from the 19th century and explained how a controversy which began with the demand for a script (Nagari), developed into a language demand (Hindi) and further became a political demand splitting two communities apart (Hindu and Muslim) and culminated in the creation of two nations (India and Pakistan)."*



Also mentioned in many of the books is an underlying angst that comes to the fore,
a desire to change the status quo as it existed. 

A desire to reform religion.
A desire to break into the middle class.
A desire to break with the modes of expression of the past (i.e. Braj Bhasha).
The spawning of a national consciousness as a result of the revolution of 1857.
Even, mabye, a desire to make a full break with the Mughal past that had proven ineffective in stopping the British.


But the entire thing seems to a be a bit of real life following fiction, and the power of new ideologies, even if they are false.
It was the missionaries that desired to create literature specific to Hindus and in doing so created the false idea that Hindi and Urdu were separate languages.

"As late as 1846, the principal of Benares College implored his students to speak their own language, the language of their culture. To this request he was told: 

We do not clearly understand what you Europeans mean by the term Hindi, for there are hundreds of dialects all in our opinion equally entitled to the name ...If the purity of Hindi is to consist in its exclusion of Musalman words, we shall require to study Persian and Arabic in order to ascertain which of the words we are in the habit of using every day, is Arabic or Persian and which is Hindi. With our present knowledge we can tell that a word is Sanskrit  or not Sanskrit, but if not Sanskrit it may be English or Portuguese instead of Hindi for anything we can tell." *Speaking Like a State: Language and Nationalism in Pakistan*  By Alyssa Ayres


And so, to this day Hindi speakers keep tabs on the words they speak and label them Hindi or Urdu based on word origin.

The spread of such false ideas a truth happened in many places the European colonizers set up shop and attempted to interpret the "history" of the native people. (i.e. see Rwanda)


----------



## Wolverine9

QURESHPOR said:


> Urdu prose’s history goes back a long time before 1804/5, in fact long time before even the foundation of Fort William College in 1781. Hazrat Gesudaraz Bandanawaz (1321-1422) is accredited with the oldest Deccani Urdu prose, a book called “Mi3raaju_l3aashiqiin”. Sab Ras by Mullah Vajhi was written in 1635.



Those works may not qualify as Urdu.  Note Grierson's comments about Urdu prose in post 105.



QURESHPOR said:


> Both Dr. Tara Chand and Dr. Sunil Kumar Chatterji are Hindu writers, the former a graduate from Oxford and the latter graduate of Universities of Calcutta and London and considered the “Father of Indian linguistics”. They can hardly be called biased.
> 
> “And finally, the verdict by Suniti Kumar Chatterji, often considered the father of Indian linguistics (again, reconverted from Urdu, cited in Gyanchand Jain, 1981):
> 
> “Historically and linguistically, Urdu is not an Islamic form of Hindi or Sankritized KhaRi Boli; the truth is to the contrary. Actually the Hindus adopted the Persianized Hindustani, which came into being in the royal court and its circles (we come across its beginning earlier in the Deccani tongue and in the Southern Muslim states of Ahmed Nagar, Bijapur and Golkonda). Since the Persian and the Arabic words were useless for them, they embraced the Devanagri script and Sanskritized the language, shunning the alien vocabulary of Persian and Arabic . . .. The above-mentioned theory that the Sanskritized Hindi was fashioned in the mode of Persianized Urdu was first proposed by Dr. Tarachand. I was against it then but now I admit that Tarachand was right.” (A Polyglot Nation and Its Linguistics, 1973)”




When native writers give their assessments about this topic, one must often read it with a grain of salt.  This is not an indictment of their qualifications; rather, their assessment appears to be clouded by an apparent _regret _over the formation of Modern Hindi.  This regret seems to have introduced a bit of bias in their perspective, whether intended or not.  Compare the tone of their comments and overall assessment with that of impartial, Western writers (McGregor, Grierson, etc.).  There's a significant difference IMO.


----------



## Qureshpor

^ Through out Imperial history, "natives" must have got something right at least on a few occasions! Please, let them have benefit of the doubt when the evidence is overwhelming in their favour! I would suggest that in terms of linguistics, Chatterji would be better placed than McGregor and more contemporary and up to date with the latest research than Grierson.


----------



## Wolverine9

I don't see how it's "overwhelming."  It's a question of accuracy and impartiality, which the Western writers have proven to be more adept in, at least on controversial topics such as these (as well as the Aryan migration theory, etc.).


----------



## Qureshpor

Wolverine9 said:


> Those works may not qualify as Urdu.  Note Grierson's comments about Urdu prose in post 105.


It is quite natural that the prose written in 1635 (Vajhi/Sabras) will differ from that written in 1802 (Amman/BaaGh-o-Bahaar), just as Chaucer's language differs from Shakespeare's. Yet both are considered English writers.


Wolverine9 said:


> I don't see how it's "overwhelming." It's a question of accuracy and impartiality, which the Western writers have proven to be more adept in, at least on controversial topics such as these (as well as the Aryan migration theory, etc.).


For the first sentence, is it merely the quantity of non-native authors that you require for a rebuttal or do you have something else in mind which would go towards supporting my "overwhelming" remark? The second part consists of rather stereotypical comments, to say the least, if not degrading.



Wolverine9 said:


> [...] When native writers give their assessments about this topic, one must often read it with a grain of salt. This is not an indictment of their qualifications; rather, their assessment appears to be clouded by an apparent _regret _over the formation of Modern Hindi. This regret seems to have introduced a bit of bias in their perspective, whether intended or not. Compare the tone of their comments and overall assessment with that of impartial, Western writers (McGregor, Grierson, etc.). There's a significant difference IMO.


Please illustrate your response with relevant quotes from Grierson and McGregor which go against what Tara Chand has said and Chatterji has come to agree with after a period of disagreement.


----------



## Wolverine9

QURESHPOR said:


> It is quite natural that the prose written in 1635 (Vajhi/Sabras) will differ from that written in 1802 (Amman/BaaGh-o-Bahaar), just as Chaucer's language differs from Shakespeare's. Yet both are considered English writers.



That may not be a good analogy.  Shakespeare's English was a continuation of Chaucer's Middle English; a part of the development of the English language.  If Grierson's assessment is correct, prose composed prior to 1800 that you consider Urdu may instead be a different dialect and not truly Urdu.  In other words, like comparing Braj to Khari boli.



QURESHPOR said:


> The second part consists of rather stereotypical comments, to say the least, if not degrading.



Not meant to be "stereotypical" or "degrading."  Just illustrating the point that it's much easier for someone who has no bones in the issue to give a more accurate and legitimate depiction of what occurred.



QURESHPOR said:


> Please illustrate your response with relevant quotes from Grierson and McGregor which go against what Tara Chand has said and Chatterji has come to agree with after a period of disagreement.



Read the intro to the McGregor book I posted.  It's a few pages long, starting on page 62.  Notice the difference in tone and how the development is portrayed.


----------



## Qureshpor

Wolverine9 said:


> That may not be a good analogy.  Shakespeare's English was a continuation of Chaucer's Middle English; a part of the development of the English language.  If Grierson's assessment is correct, prose composed prior to 1800 that you consider Urdu may instead be a different dialect and not truly Urdu.  In other words, like comparing Braj to Khari boli.


I don't accept this line of thought but we won't dwell on it as the point at hand is whether Modern Hindi was created on the model of the existing Urdu by removing words of Perso-Arabic origins and replacing them with Sanskrit at Fort William College in the early 19th Century.


> Not meant to be "stereotypical" or "degrading."  Just illustrating the point that it's much easier for someone who has no bones in the issue to give a more accurate and legitimate depiction of what occurred.


It is not impossible for a native to give "an accurate and legitimate depiction of what occurred".


> Read the intro to the McGregor book I posted.  It's a few pages long, starting on page 62.  Notice the difference in tone and how the development is portrayed.


Thank you. I have quickly skimmed through the pages. Unfortunately, some pages are missing too, so I nor you can say if something of importance, one way or another, is there. The most relevant part to support your line of thinking is this sentence..

"It is such a style of language, Sanskritic rather than Persian in cultural affiliation, not “created by the British” but owing its main development entirely to the new conditions brought about by their presence..."

​Please quote something from Grierson before I come back with my rebuttal.


----------



## Wolverine9

The missing pages occur later.  The introduction (pp. 62-63) is complete and shows the tone and perspective of McGregor differs from that of Tara Chand and Chatterji.

Reference Grierson p. 86 section 207.


----------



## Qureshpor

Wolverine9 said:


> The missing pages occur later.  The introduction (pp. 62-63) is complete and shows the tone and perspective of McGregor differs from that of Tara Chand and Chatterji.
> 
> Reference Grierson p. 86 section 207.


Please save me the trouble of searching the relevant bit. I can read only up to page 78 and then the book ends. Just let us have his central theme/point.


----------



## Wolverine9

QURESHPOR said:


> It is not impossible for a native to give "an accurate and legitimate depiction of what occurred".



Not impossible, but it sure seems difficult for Tara Chand and Chatterji to present the facts accurately in a neutral manner.



QURESHPOR said:


> Please save me the trouble of searching the relevant bit. I can read only up to page 78 and then the book ends. Just let us have his central theme/point.



Did you try this link?


----------



## Qureshpor

Wolverine9 said:


> I don't see how it's "overwhelming." It's a question of accuracy and impartiality, which the Western writers have proven to be more adept in, at least on controversial topics such as these (as well as the Aryan migration theory, etc.).





QURESHPOR said:


> [...]The second part consists of rather stereotypical comments, to say the least, if not degrading.[...]





Wolverine9 said:


> [...]Not meant to be "stereotypical" or "degrading." Just illustrating the point that it's much easier for someone who has no bones in the issue to give a more accurate and legitimate depiction of what occurred.[...]





QURESHPOR said:


> It is not impossible for a native to give "an accurate and legitimate depiction of what occurred".





Wolverine9 said:


> Not impossible, but it sure seems difficult for Tara Chand and Chatterji to present the facts accurately in a neutral manner.





QURESHPOR said:


> [..] The most relevant part to support your line of thinking is this sentence..
> 
> "It is such a style of language, Sanskritic rather than Persian in cultural affiliation, not “created by the British” but owing its main development entirely to the new conditions brought about by their presence..."[..]





Wolverine9 said:


> [...]Did you try this link?


I am sorry I have not been able to have access to this link. I think it is fair to say that if one is trying to illustrate one's point, one ought to quote the relevant part from the source rather than expect the other person to read the whole material and seek out the piece connected with the argument. But no matter. 

Your yardstick for accuracy and impartiality seems to be the Western writers. So, if I employ your chosen benchmark, I hope you will accept their accuracy and their depiction of the facts as legitimate. I  also hope that you will excuse my inclusion of a native here and there but I am certain that their inclusion will not muddy the waters in any way. I will try to get them out of the way right at the start and give the quotes by western authors in blue.

Gyanchand Jain, an Urdu scholar par excellence in a work published in 1981 cites George Grierson (of "The Linguistic Survey of India" fame) from "Hindi Sahitya kaa itihaas" (by Ramchandra Shukla 1884-1941) where Grierson writes in the forward to a book by Lallu Lal (of Fort William College and Prem Sagar fame) the following (translated into English from Gyanchand Jain's Urdu)..

*“No such language existed in India before, so when Lallu Lal wrote Prem Sagar, he was actually inventing an entirely new language.”* (Grierson)

As we are talking about Lallu Lal, the author of Prem Sagar written around 1805, Ramchandra Shukla, writes:

*"If Lallu Lal didn’t know Urdu, he would not have been that successful in keeping the Perso-Arabic words out of Prem Sagar. So many of these words had been intermixed in to day-to-day language that they were difficult to identify for somebody familiar only with Sanskrit-Hindi.”* (Hindi Sahitiya kaa Itihaas, cited in Gyanchand Jain, 1981)

Pandit Chandra Dhar Sharma Guleri wrote a series of articles in the Nagari Pracharini Patrika in 1921 (1978 Samvat) on old Hindi. He says:

*Mere kahne ka tatparya yeh tha ki Hinduon ki rachi hui purani kavita jo milti bai woh Brajbhasha ya purvi Baiswari, Avadhi, Rajasthani, Gujarati adi hi main milti hai, arthat "Pari boli" main pai jati hai. Khari Boli ya Vartman Hindi ke arambh kal ke gadya aur padya ko dekhkar yehi jan parta hai ki Urdu rachna men Farsi Arbi Tatsam ya Tadbhavon ko milakar Sanskrit ya Hindi Tatsam aur Tadbhava rakhne se Hindi bana li gai hai.

*I have already quoted "Keay" but for the sake of continuity, I shall do so again.
*
*Mr. F. E. Keay, the author of _A History of Hindi Literature_ (1920) in the Heritage of India series, says: *"Urdu however, had a vocabulary borrowed largely from the Persian and Arabic languages, which were specially connected with Muhammadanism. A literary language for Hindi-speaking people which could commend itself more to Hindus was very desirable, and the result was obtained by taking Urdu and expelling from it words of Persian and Arabic origin, and substituting for them words of Sanskrit or Hindi origin." 

*Mr. Jules Bloch, the author of _La formation de la Language Marathe_,  states: 
*
(Lallu Lal, under the inspiration of Dr. Gilchrist, changed all that by writing the famous Prem Sagar, whose prose portions are on the whole Urdu, from which Persian words have been throughout replaced by Indo-Aryan words. . . . The new dialect gave a lingua franca to the Hindus.)
*
William Frazer in his “A Literary History of India, 1893 writes:

*“High Hindi is a book language evolved under the influence of the English who induced native writers to compose works for general use in a form of Hindustani in which all the words of Arabic and Persian origin were omitted, Sanskrit words being employed in its place.” 
*
Sadal Mishra was another writer of the newly conceived Hindi at Fort William College. This is what he says about the Modus Operandi as commanded to him by John Borthwick Gilchrist 1759-1841, the "kartaa-dhartaa" of Fort William College)

*“Gilchrist ne … aik din aagyaa dee k adhiyaa tum Ramayun ko aisee bolee meN karo jis meN Farsi, Arabi na aave. tab se maiN is ko KhaRi Boli meN karne lagaa.”

*And this is what he said in 1798.

*“Shankuntalaa kaa doosraa tarjuma ‘KhaRi Boli’ yaa Hindustaan kee Khaalis boli (sterling tongue of India) meN hai. Hindustani [that is, Urdu] se muKhtalif ye sirf is baat meN hai k Arabi o Farsi kaa lafz chhaanT liyaa jaataa hai.”* (cited in Gyanchand Jain, 1981)

I am sure you know what "chhaaNT liyaa jaataa hai" means!

Now let us move onto modern times.

Professor Ralph Russell (1918-2008), of School of Oriental and African Studies.

*“There is no doubt that modern Hindi came into existence as the result of a widespread feeling amongst Hindus that Urdu was the product of centuries of Muslim domination and that Hindu self-respect demanded that “Muslim” words should be expelled from their KhaRi Boli base and replaced by words of pure Indian origin [...]

*The latest piece of research on this topic is by Christopher. R. King _One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India-_1994. The book is available in its entirety on the net. It has been reviewed by_ Sushil Srivastava _of Allahabad University and David Lelyveld. Both are short pieces well worth the read. I strongly recommend to all interested parties to read these reviews, especially the more detailed one by Srivastava. After this no one would (should?) be left in any doubt concerning the truth about Modern Hindi and the causes of its breaking away from Urdu.

http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/10/23bookreviews.pdf  (pp 246-249)

*King moves from his theoretical introduction to a survey of the rise of modern standard Hindi. In the course of the nineteenth century, according to this account, the so-called Khari Boli dialect associated with Urdu was relexified with an infusion of Sanskrit-derived terms. It was this “Hindi,” what King calls “the ‘Sanskritization’ of Urdu” (p.59), not Braj or Avadhi, that continued to expand as the language of instruction, publication and official business. Thus **literary Urdu was the foundation as well as the negative identity of Hindi: Hindi was what Urdu was not, and “a major impetus for the Hindi movement was the existence of Urdu” (p. 179)....

**Although King notes Amrit Ray’s claims that the differentiation of Hindi and Urdu was established quite apart from British administrative intervention, the weight of his evidence demonstrates that the institutionalization of standard languages in schools and government offices were matters addressed and heavily influenced by official policy."

*http://id3461.securedata.net/urdustudies/pdf/10/28KingLanguage.pdf (pp 217-228)

*It is thus that Modern “Hindi”—the new variant of “Hindustani”—lacked a distinct past, which led its spokesmen to look for, and ultimately to claim, a consistent and continuous past for it in the traditions of Khari Boli. King points out that the champions of this “new” Hindi inspired to set it up as a rival of the Urdu language, which led them to appropriate for it the linguistic traditions of Urdu itself....

*Modern “Hindi,” a language without any roots, thus came to claim for its antecedents the traditions of Khari Boli. *There is, however, another reason for all this appropriation: the anxiety **of the inventors of this variant of “Hindustani” not only to displace Urdu as the language of “Hindustan” but also to establish the hegemony of this “new” language-form over the other new Indo-Aryan (henceforward, NIA) languages.*


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## Wolverine9

I think you've misunderstood me.  I'm not disputing _when _Modern Hindi was developed.  My contention was with the _tone _and_ perspective _between the authors I contrasted.  All scholars are in agreement on when it was developed.  But the way the information is detailed differs and raises questions of accuracy and whether the reader is being given a different impression upon reading those materials.

As an analogy.  When one watches the news on TV, one can listen to a news anchor or channel that presents facts about a hotly debated topic in a neutral way without showing inherent bias, or one can watch a program that presents the same facts with a "spin." I felt Tara Chand and Chatterji chose the latter method in contrast to McGregor and Grierson.


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## Qureshpor

^ I think it would be unfair to draw this conclusion from the odd paragraph here and there from their works. But be that as it may, it has given me an opportunity to collect and present this evidence once again, some of it new to this thread. This evidence is not only concerning *when* Modern Hindi came into existence but more important *how*! My feeling is it is time for the thread to come to an end and perhaps even be closed. I do hope you take this opportunity to read the reviews on King's book.


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## marrish

Having taken the recent posts into consideration and the issues being touched upon, i.e. the basis for MSH, Braj, Awadhi etc. as well as the nature of the very last posts I hope all of you can benefit from the following quotation from a Western scholar, Prof. C. P. Masica. Whatever be the case, this piece is very relevant to the topic under discussion and leaves no room for any ambiguity or misunderstanding. At the same time it has not yet been added to this thread. 

" Confusion of another sort, mainly at the popular and political levels but obtruding at the academic level as well, complicates the picture with regard to Hindi itself, as we have seen (Chapter 2, section 3). *Academic as well as popular tradition includes under earlier Hindi the medieval literature in every language and dialect from western **Rajasthan (ḍingaḷ) to North Bihar (Maithili), but none of these stands in direct linguistic antecedence to Modern Standard Hindi.* (The closest is perhaps the mixed dialect of the Nirguṇa poets sometimes called _sādhū bhāṣā_ which at least incorporates some elements of Khari Boli.) Some of them even represent different branches of Indo-Aryan (see Chapter 8). *The one language that is antecedent, namely Urdu, does not usually appear on the list, for reasons which have nothing to do with linguistics.* "
 
* Prof. C. P. Masica, The Indo-Aryan Languages, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 54 *[highlights mine]​


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## Wolverine9

QURESHPOR said:


> *It is thus that Modern “Hindi”—the new variant of “Hindustani”—lacked a distinct past, which led its spokesmen to look for, and ultimately to claim, a consistent and continuous past for it in the traditions of Khari Boli. King points out that the champions of this “new” Hindi inspired to set it up as a rival of the Urdu language, which led them to appropriate for it the linguistic traditions of Urdu itself....
> 
> Modern “Hindi,” a language without any roots, thus came to claim for its antecedents the traditions of Khari Boli.* *There is, however, another reason for all this appropriation: the anxiety **of the inventors of this variant of “Hindustani” not only to displace Urdu as the language of “Hindustan” but also to establish the hegemony of this “new” language-form over the other new Indo-Aryan (henceforward, NIA) languages.*



Before this thread is potentially closed, I wanted to point out that the sentence in black ink and overall tone discredits the above assessment by Srivastava. It doesn't appear King used those exact words. Regardless of how Modern Hindi developed, it obviously had its roots in Khari Boli. 

Modern Hindi literature may have begun in the 19th century and modelled after Urdu, but the situation is more complex than that and to solely focus on this (which is what some here are doing) is to ignore the complete historical and linguistic picture. The antecedent of Urdu too is the original Khari Boli, which in its original state would have been virtually devoid of Perso-Arabic words and closer to what is today's Modern Hindi than Urdu. This was still apparently the case at the time of Grierson, at least as it pertains to the majority of Hindustani speakers, because he says "Lallu Lal, under the inspiration of Dr Gilchrist, changed this by writing the well known Prem Sagar, a work which was, so far as prose portions went, practically written in Urdu, with Indo-Aryan words substituted wherever a writer in that form of speech would use Persian ones. *It was thus an automatic reversion to the actual vernacular of the Upper Doab.*"


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## Qureshpor

Wolverine9 said:


> Before this thread is potentially closed, I wanted to point out that the sentence in black ink and overall tone discredits the above assessment by Srivastava. It doesn't appear King used those exact words. Regardless of how Modern Hindi developed, it obviously had its roots in Khari Boli.
> 
> Modern Hindi literature may have begun in the 19th century and modelled after Urdu, but the situation is more complex than that and to solely focus on this (which is what some here are doing) is to ignore the complete historical and linguistic picture. The antecedent of Urdu too is the original Khari Boli, which in its original state would have been virtually devoid of Perso-Arabic words and closer to what is today's Modern Hindi than Urdu. This was still apparently the case at the time of Grierson, at least as it pertains to the majority of Hindustani speakers, because he says "Lallu Lal, under the inspiration of Dr Gilchrist, changed this by writing the well known Prem Sagar, a work which was, so far as prose portions went, practically written in Urdu, with Indo-Aryan words substituted wherever a writer in that form of speech would use Persian ones. *It was thus an automatic reversion to the actual vernacular of the Upper Doab.*"


Wolverine9, it appears that your main concern is "tone" of these scholars. You had issues with both Tara Chand and Chatterji's tone and now the reviewer of King's book, Professor Sushil Srivastava's tone is not quite palatable. If King had used these exact words, they would have been in quotation marks and had they been grossly inaccurate, there would have been a lawsuit against the reviewer. Clearly, this has not happened and consequently what is written by him should be accepted as accurate summation of King's views. Truth can be bitter. Clearly, I did not search for scholars who were bearers of this "tone".

Frankly, I can not comprehend how you can say that the pristine KhaRii-Bolii (without its Perso-Arabic vocabulary) would be virtually the same as Modern Hindi. Are you seriously saying that the sample from Prem Chand that I provided in #post 37 of "What is Shuddh" thread is KhaRii-Bolii?!! I hope you did n't mean this. If you stripped Urdu of its Perso-Arabic vocabulary and Modern Hindi of its Sanskrit, then we will achieve a language that may resemble KhaRii-Bolii, taking into account the grammatical changes that will have occurred from those distant days. If you think that Prem Sagar's language would be the same as the vernacular of Upper Doab, then you are sadly mistaken.

The recent posts have come as a result of the following sequence, which you yourself would know.


tonyspeed said:


> [..]I am not understanding your meaning here. Written KhaRii Boli in Devanagarii script (for the purpose of prose) was invented at FWC. What does Urdu have to do with this?





QURESHPOR said:


> Both Dr. Tara Chand and Dr. Sunil Kumar Chatterji are Hindu writers, the former a graduate from Oxford and the latter graduate of Universities of Calcutta and London and considered the “Father of Indian linguistics”. They can hardly be called biased. And finally, the verdict by Suniti Kumar Chatterji, often considered the father of Indian linguistics (again, reconverted from Urdu, cited in Gyanchand Jain, 1981):
> 
> “Historically and linguistically, Urdu is not an Islamic form of Hindi or Sankritized KhaRi Boli; the truth is to the contrary. Actually the Hindus adopted the Persianized Hindustani, which came into being in the royal court and its circles (we come across its beginning earlier in the Deccani tongue and in the Southern Muslim states of Ahmed Nagar, Bijapur and Golkonda). Since the Persian and the Arabic words were useless for them, they embraced the Devanagri script and Sanskritized the language, shunning the alien vocabulary of Persian and Arabic . . .. The above-mentioned theory that the Sanskritized Hindi was fashioned in the mode of Persianized Urdu was first proposed by Dr. Tarachand. I was against it then but now I admit that Tarachand was right.” (A Polyglot Nation and Its Linguistics, 1973)”[...]


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## marrish

Wolverine9 said:


> Before this thread is potentially closed, I wanted to point out that the sentence in black ink and overall tone discredits the above assessment by Srivastava. It doesn't appear King used those exact words. Regardless of how Modern Hindi developed, it obviously had its roots in Khari Boli.


Modern Standard Hindi is surely based on KB but it doesn't mean that it had its roots in KB! A careful reading of the quotation as well as of the article in its entirety clearly leads one to the conclusion that MSH had no roots at all because it was a test tube baby. It is not only the sentence in black ink and the overall tone that can lead the believers of the Sanskrit->Prakrit->Hindi (or even Sanskrit->Hindi) theory to discard anything that is established to the contrary. You must only compare the tone of this review and the tone of anti-Urdu publications.



> Modern Hindi literature may have begun in the 19th century and modelled after Urdu, but the situation is more complex than that and to solely focus on this (which is what some here are doing) is to ignore the complete historical and linguistic picture.


Focusing on this is the core business of this thread because it asks what the origin of the division was. The question is actually not about the Modern Hindi literature but about MSH as a language. Of course the situation is more complex as far as the further development of Hindi is concerned but it exceeds the scope of the present topic at hand. Both historical and linguistic evidence material has been presented to answer the question of the Origin of the Division.



> The antecedent of Urdu too is the original Khari Boli, which in its original state would have been virtually devoid of Perso-Arabic words and closer to what is today's Modern Hindi than Urdu. This was still apparently the case at the time of Grierson, at least as it pertains to the majority of Hindustani speakers, because he says "Lallu Lal, under the inspiration of Dr Gilchrist, changed this by writing the well known Prem Sagar, a work which was, so far as prose portions went, practically written in Urdu, with Indo-Aryan words substituted wherever a writer in that form of speech would use Persian ones. *It was thus an automatic reversion to the actual vernacular of the Upper Doab.*"



It is difficult to lead the discussion further if one departs from the thesis of ''original KB'' and its ''original state''. It is more than obvious that the Urdu litterateurs have developped this KB basis across the centuries in various, often very remote locations from each other. If you consider the above mentioned works by Deccani writers (who actually migrated from Dehli) as Urdu works (scholars do), you will surely agree with me that KB which was the grammatical basis of Urdu must have been drastically different then and in the times of Grierson. To add to this, you may compare the known Urdu grammar with the KB of nowadays - very different! 

Saying that the antecedent of Urdu in direct line is ''original KB'' is a myth and to assert that the purging of Persian words were to be an automatic reversion to the actual vernacular of the Upper Doab is nothing less than a sample of magical thinking. Such reversion would require travelling in time back a couple of centuries, whereas the fact is that MSH hasn't discarded the linguistical development which the language known as ''Hindi'', which you call Hindustani, which is called at present Urdu has acquired over the centuries.


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## Wolverine9

QURESHPOR said:


> Truth can be bitter.



It's not bitter at all.  This is a discussion.  The sentence in black ink represents Srivastava's conclusion.  He's not alluding to King in that instance, so it may or may not be a paraphrasing of King.  Regardless, my original concern about the validity of that sentence stands.



> Frankly, I can not comprehend how you can say that the pristine KhaRii-Bolii (without its Perso-Arabic vocabulary) would be virtually the same as Modern Hindi.



I didn't say that. I said it would be *closer *to Modern Hindi than Urdu, which is true, because both original Khari Boli and Modern Hindi have a lexicon that is nearly all (or at least, the vast majority is) Indo-Aryan.  The same cannot be said for Urdu.


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## Qureshpor

Wolverine9 said:


> It's not bitter at all.  This is a discussion.  The sentence in black ink represents Srivastava's conclusion.  He's not alluding to King in that instance, so it may or may not be a paraphrasing of King.  Regardless, my original concern about the validity of that sentence stands.
> 
> I didn't say that. I said it would be *closer *to Modern Hindi than Urdu, which is true, because both original Khari Boli and Modern Hindi have a lexicon that is nearly all (or at least, the vast majority is) Indo-Aryan.  The same cannot be said for Urdu.


This is fair enough. I find your line of thinking difficult to comprehend. Let's take a simplistic approach.

If Urdu = KhaRii-Bolii + Persian + Arabic (U = KB +P+A)

& Modern Hindi = Urdu -P-A+ S (MH = U-P-A+S)

Therefore U = KB + P + A

Likewise MH = KB +S

Then how is MH closer to KB?? It can only be closer to KB if S is removed from it. Please don't forget that in the Prakrit KhaRii-Bolii, as an example the word for night would be "raat" and not "raatri" I think it might be better to agree to disagree. Do you have access to any pure KB samples and extracts from Prem Sagar?


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## Wolverine9

marrish said:


> Modern Standard Hindi is surely based on KB but it doesn't mean that it had its roots in KB! A careful reading of the quotation as well as of the article in its entirety clearly leads one to the conclusion that MSH had no roots at all because it was a test tube baby. It is not only the sentence in black ink and the overall tone that can lead the believers of the Sanskrit->Prakrit->Hindi (or even Sanskrit->Hindi) theory to discard anything that is established to the contrary. You must only compare the tone of this review and the tone of anti-Urdu publications.



"Root" in this context means origin or source.  Therefore, Khari Boli is the root.  Srivastava phrased his conclusion poorly.  Sanskrit->Prakrit->Hindi is accurate unless you're specifically referring to MSH.  Even then one can make the case it is accurate because MSH was developed from Sanskrit and Prakrit with Urdu as an intermediary.  The reason why Urdu was chosen as the intermediary is because it was hitherto the only written standard for Khari Boli.  Keep in mind that Modern Turkish and Modern Hebrew were also created by what some would term "artificial" means.  Whether rightly or wrongly, circumstances sometimes dictate such language development.  A "test tube baby" is not a fair characterization.  Each standardized, written language has been "invented" in some manner.  Wasn't Standard Urdu also "invented" or in your words a "test tube baby" of sorts when it was first adapted for writing by a few select scholars?  Someone had to make the decision to put the language into writing, without knowing whether it would be successful, and invent new characters to represent sounds not present in Persian, popularize it amongst the target population, etc.  The main difference between the development of Standard Urdu and Modern Standard Hindi is the time period, circumstances, and the source of the influence (e.g. Muslim rulers for Urdu; British for Hindi).  The end result is not so different in that they are both standardized registers of Khari Boli.



> Focusing on this is the core business of this thread because it asks what the origin of the division was. The question is actually not about the Modern Hindi literature but about MSH as a language. Of course the situation is more complex as far as the further development of Hindi is concerned but it exceeds the scope of the present topic at hand. Both historical and linguistic evidence material has been presented to answer the question of the Origin of the Division.



Yes, it's about the origin of the division, but it's not specifically about MSH.  So it's not as simplistic as "it happened because of FWC."  It only became politicized in the 19th century.  One can argue that the original division occurred with the development of Urdu itself!  It was a departure from the original Khari Boli and was not uniformly adopted by all speakers.  Vocabulary content differed depending on education and religion, among other factors. Urdu was the earliest known _written _standard for Khari Boli, but it doesn't mean it closely represented the speech of all Khari Boli speakers.  This is what Grierson is alluding to.  Urdu was (or became) too Persianized for most Khari Boli (i.e. colloquial Hindi) speakers.


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## Wolverine9

QURESHPOR said:


> This is fair enough. I find your line of thinking difficult to comprehend. Let's take a simplistic approach.
> 
> If Urdu = KhaRii-Bolii + Persian + Arabic (U = KB +P+A)
> 
> & Modern Hindi = Urdu -P-A+ S (MH = U-P-A+S)
> 
> Therefore U = KB + P + A
> 
> Likewise MH = KB +S
> 
> Then how is MH closer to KB?? It can only be closer to KB if S is removed from it. Please don't forget that in the Prakrit KhaRii-Bolii, as an example the word for night would be "raat" and not "raatri" I think it might be better to agree to disagree. Do you have access to any pure KB samples and extracts from Prem Sagar?



Whether it's Khari Boli or Sanskrit, the lexicon is still Indo-Aryan in both cases, with the Khari Boli and Sanskrit forms bearing strong resemblances for many words. That fact alone makes the original Khari Boli more similar to Modern Hindi.  Add in the fact that all NIA languages (except Urdu) have freely adopted Sanskrit loanwords historically, and that makes it very likely that the original Khari Boli too would've developed a Sanskritic nature similar to Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, etc. Thus it wouldn't be too different from Modern Standard Hindi in this regard.


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## Faylasoof

^ I'm sorry to say but this argument is quite presumptuous! Khari Boli "naturally" developing into something more similar to Modern Standard Hindi? There is really no reason to assume this. In fact, in all probability it would have remained a minor dialect, with Braj continuing to dominate as the literary language in the western region of the _doaab_ and Awadhi on the eastern side. Urdu as it developed borrowed plenty of Sanskrit and Sanskrit-derived words and of course those from Prakrit, without which it would it would simply cease to exist! The language has gone through several phases, as languages do, and as a rule has routinely borrowed words from other Indic languages such as Braj, Kannauji, Hiryanvi, Rajasthani, Punjabi and later Awadhi / Bhojpuri as it moved East.  Only for a short period in the first half of the 19th century was there a slowing down of _tatsama_ words coming into Urdu but this trend was reversed and Sanskrit borrowing resumed later on, the language continuing to borrow from other languages too, including the newly introduced European languages such as Portuguese and esp. English, adopting and adapting words from them.


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## Wolverine9

^ It's status as a minor dialect or a major one is not the issue.  Given the examples of all the other NIA languages I mentioned, there is every reason to assume Khari Boli too would have developed a Sanskritic nature.  Even if Urdu has _tatsama _Sanskrit loans and not just Prakrit derivatives, it still has not borrowed freely from Sanskrit the way other NIA languages have.  And that's understandable because it's culturally intertwined with Persian.

By the way, Shackle and Snell dispute your assertion of _tatsama _loans in Urdu: "S [Sanskrit] - as a source of loans, as opposed to its historical status as the etymological ancestor shared by HU - is immensely prominent in H [Hindi] but virtually absent in U [Urdu]."


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## Qureshpor

Wolverine9, I don't know where this discussion is going to and if it is going to achieve anything!

TS stated that "..written Urdu did NOT spawn written Hindi." and in response I went onto demonstrate that it did by referring to Shamsur Rahman Faruqi quoting Chatterji as per post 53. I also quoted Keay from post 59. It was then suggested by TS that Keay's was a "biased statment". I produced a quote from R. P. Dewhurst writing in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society stating that Keay's "A History of Hindi Literature" was a "sympathetic summary of Hindi Literature". I had already indicated that both Tara Chand, a Hindu and an Oxford scholar and Chatterji, a Hindu and considered "Father of Indian linguistics" are unlikely to be biased in favour of Urdu.

You then replied and I'll quote the whole piece because it contains several points, which I shall highlight.

When native writers give their assessments about this topic, one must often read it with a grain of salt. This is not an indictment of their qualifications; rather, their assessment appears to be clouded by an apparent _regret over the formation of Modern Hindi. This regret seems to have introduced a bit of bias in their perspective, whether intended or not. Compare the tone of their comments and overall assessment with that of impartial, Western writers (McGregor, Grierson, etc.). There's a significant difference IMO.

_You raise the issues of "regret", "bias" and "tone" in the writings of these native scholars. I then quoted a long list of Western and native scholars, finishing with extracts from reviews of Christopher. R. King's book, which apart from its title has been well received by most critics and reviewers. He has 25 years of background working in the field of Hindi language (He is NOT an Urdu scholar, I hasten to add). It seems he, as a Western writer, still did not  say the right things for you and you have come out to blame his reviewer, Professor Sushil Srivastava. 

Now, your discussion has taken a totally new direction..

"The antecedent of Urdu too is the original Khari Boli, which in its original state would have been virtually devoid of Perso-Arabic words and closer to what is today's Modern Hindi than Urdu.... because both original Khari Boli and Modern Hindi have a lexicon that is nearly all (or at least, the vast majority is) Indo-Aryan. The same cannot be said for Urdu"

" Given the examples of all the other NIA languages I mentioned, there is every reason to assume Khari Boli too would have developed a Sanskritic nature."

"One can argue that the original division occurred with the development of Urdu itself!"

One can go on and live in a hypothetical world. But the reality is that a scholar of King's caliber has shown that the main causes of the division were Fort William College's handiwork, Hindu Nationalism, their goal to have the language in Devanagri and aligning language with religion and communal politics. What KhaRii-Bolii would have been or could have been is irrelevant. It became Urdu is what is relevant and we don't have H.G. Well's time machine to go back in time and "zap" those people who introduced Perso-Arabic vocabulary into the local vernacular. The reason why Sanskrit is immensely prominent in Modern Hindi is surely obvious. In order to differentiate itself from Urdu, it had to wear a new dress (Devanagri) and go through forced feeding of Sanskrit words at the Fort William Factory's assembly line! Examples of Turkish and Hebrew have no bearing with Urdu-Hindi divide.

Finally, I respect the scholarship of Snell and Shackle. Hasrat Jaipuri was an Urdu poet writing Urdu songs in "Hindi" films. He wrote songs for many films including the film "tere ghar ke saamne". The song "dekho ruuThaa nah karo" has been used by Professor Snell to discuss aspects of Hindi poetry. Read the song (and listen to it) and tell me if it is a Hindi song or an Urdu song. Is n't this blatant appropriation of Urdu to serve the purpose of his Hindi teaching?

http://hindiurduflagship.org/resources/learning-teaching/kavyarth/#anand

By the way I am asking this again. Do you have access to pristine samples of KB and Fort William College's Prem Sagar? If you have, it would be nice to see how the Prem Sagar compares with the language of "do-aab". How do Modern Hindi speakers translate the foreign "do-aab" into their "native" Hindi?


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## Faylasoof

I don't think this discussion is leading anywhere! 

Hardly surprising since one moment an assertion such as the following is made:

"_Thus it (KhaRii Bolii) wouldn't be too different from Modern Standard Hindi in this regard._" 

and then this:

"_there is every reason to assume Khari Boli too would have developed a Sanskritic nature_"

The two mean quite different things! Besides, all this is pure speculation. 

I don't think I'm contradicting Shackle and Snell. We all know there are more_ tatsama_ words in Modern Hindi than Urdu because the former was Sanskritized! The use of _tatsama _ words was much less common in Apabhramsha anyway so its descendant, Urdu, is merely following that trend.  The most common words in Urdu are of course _tadbhava_ and are derived through Prakrit / Apabhramsha. 

True, that at a stage Persian influence proved very strong on Urdu for obvious reasons. Most cite the recommendation of Raja Todar Mal, Akbar's "finance minister", for the use of Persian in all administrative activities as the start of this influence. However, that didn't stop borrowings from other languages and Urdu, a living and continually evolving language, is no longer being Persianized in the same manner. If anything,  it is getting more Anglicized! You notice this most obviously when walking the streets of cities as far apart as Lucknow, Old Delhi (Shahjahanabad), Karachi, Lahore, Multan and the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi....and one needs to walk the street to hear the street Urdu and not just read this "expert" or that who, most likely, haven't done the same. 

BTW, this Anglicization is seen not just on the streets but also in 'journalese' Urdu and official documents emanating from Pakistan (including court proceedings, e.g. _kasToDial rimaanD_ = custodial remand), official terms, e.g.   _elekshan kamiishan aaf paakistaan_ = Election Commission of Pakistan[ -- even the English 'of' (aaf) has been taken on board, officially! No need for the _izaafat _anymore!]. There are countless other examples of this Anglicization. 

Urdu has always borrowed and continues to borrow from many languages so "free borrowing from Sanskrit" alone is irrelevant.

The origin of this division has already been discussed in earlier posts and now some are arguing just for the sake of it. Like other threads we seem to be going round in circles, which means going nowhere!


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## Wolverine9

QURESHPOR said:


> You raise the issues of "regret", "bias" and "tone" in the writings of these native scholars. I then quoted a long list of Western and native scholars, finishing with extracts from reviews of Christopher. R. King's book, which apart from its title has been well received by most critics and reviewers. He has 25 years of background working in the field of Hindi language (He is NOT an Urdu scholar, I hasten to add). It seems he, as a Western writer, still did not  say the right things for you and you have come out to *blame *his reviewer, Professor Sushil Srivastava.




Disagreeing with someone is not blaming.



> One can go on and live in a hypothetical world. But the reality is that a scholar of King's caliber has shown that the main causes of the division were Fort William College's handiwork, Hindu Nationalism, their goal to have the language in Devanagri and aligning language with religion and communal politics. What KhaRii-Bolii would have been or could have been is irrelevant. It became Urdu is what is relevant and we don't have H.G. Well's time machine to go back in time and "zap" those people who introduced Perso-Arabic vocabulary into the local vernacular. The reason why Sanskrit is immensely prominent in Modern Hindi is surely obvious. In order to differentiate itself from Urdu, it had to wear a new dress (Devanagri) and go through forced feeding of Sanskrit words at the Fort William Factory's assembly line!



I've already mentioned the development of MSH during the 19th century, which is what King discusses.  And that is one way of explaining the division.  My original comment was about the development of vernacular Urdu in contrast to less Persianized forms of Khari Boli speech.  So my point still stands.



> Examples of Turkish and Hebrew have no bearing with Urdu-Hindi divide.



It was relevant to mention given the context.



> Finally, I respect the scholarship of Snell and Shackle. Hasrat Jaipuri was an Urdu poet writing Urdu songs in "Hindi" films. He wrote songs for many films including the film "tere ghar ke saamne". The song "dekho ruuThaa nah karo" has been used by Professor Snell to discuss aspects of Hindi poetry. Read the song (and listen to it) and tell me if it is a Hindi song or an Urdu song. Is n't this blatant appropriation of Urdu to serve the purpose of his Hindi teaching?
> 
> http://hindiurduflagship.org/resources/learning-teaching/kavyarth/#anand



How self-serving of you!  You promote the views of King as related in reviews (which don't even fully account for the context of his comments in his article) because you believe it helps your agenda, yet you are somewhat dismissive of Snell because he says things that are true which you don't like.

It certainly is Hindi and not a blatant appropriation of Urdu.  Those lyrics would belong to both languages.  I think you've succumbed to your own propaganda about what Hindi is vis a vis Urdu.



> By the way I am asking this again. Do you have access to pristine samples of KB and Fort William College's Prem Sagar?



No, I don't.



> How do Modern Hindi speakers translate the foreign "do-aab" into their "native" Hindi?



Most Hindi speakers speak colloquial Hindi not the standardized language.  So _do-aab_ would be _do-aab_.


I think Shackle and Snell were correct in asserting the "insidious simplifications" of some "present Urdu as a bastardized version of Hindi, or alternatively Hindi as some illegitimate offspring of Urdu."

I don't think anyone in this thread has promoted the view in blue.  However, it seems some are implying or even advocating the view in red, which is quite ludicrous, inaccurate, and grossly irresponsible.


----------



## marrish

QURESHPOR said:


> Finally, I respect the scholarship of Snell and Shackle. Hasrat Jaipuri was an Urdu poet writing Urdu songs in "Hindi" films. He wrote songs for many films including the film "tere ghar ke saamne". The song "dekho ruuThaa nah karo" has been used by Professor Snell to discuss aspects of Hindi poetry. Read the song (and listen to it) and tell me if it is a Hindi song or an Urdu song. Is n't this blatant appropriation of Urdu to serve the purpose of his Hindi teaching?
> 
> http://hindiurduflagship.org/resources/learning-teaching/kavyarth/#anand


I have complied with your request to both listen and read the song, QP SaaHib. I have nothing more to add to what you said about the appropriation of Urdu for the purposes of teaching Hindi, not even having mentioned by mistake which language the song is in. However, leaving Prof. Shackle aside, whom I admire for his contributions to Punjabi scholarship, I feel urged to note it here, for the record, that my respect for the scholarship of Prof. R. Snell is not that high, the opinion of mine which I have aired on the Forum before, and this case of let's call it, negligence, only undermines his authority. To add insult to injury, the transliteration of the song into Devnagari contains blatant mistakes, one of them being ''samaa'' instead of ''samaaN'' - the word you have referred to just a couple of minutes before in the newest thread as well as wrong gender of one of the nouns. I'm sure it wouldn't have happened if he took the trouble to transcribe it on basis of the original Urdu text instead of relying on his own listening skills. If anyone is interested in the details, a new thread can be opened or you can contact me by PM.


----------



## Wolverine9

Faylasoof said:


> Hardly surprising since one moment an assertion such as the following is made:
> 
> "_Thus it (KhaRii Bolii) wouldn't be too different from Modern Standard Hindi in this regard._"
> 
> and then this:
> 
> "_there is every reason to assume Khari Boli too would have developed a Sanskritic nature_"
> 
> The two mean quite different things! Besides, all this is pure speculation.



The two statements are consistent.  Read them again carefully.



> I don't think I'm contradicting Shackle and Snell. We all know there are more_ tatsama_ words in Modern Hindi than Urdu because the former was Sanskritized! The use of _tatsama _ words was much less common in Apabhramsha anyway so its descendant, Urdu, is merely following that trend.  The most common words in Urdu are of course _tadbhava_ and are derived through Prakrit / Apabhramsha.



It was a contradiction because you asserted Sanskrit borrowing resumed after the first half of the 19th century, which couldn't be true if Shackle and Snell mention that Sanskrit loans are virtually absent in Urdu!  If you meant Prakrit or derivative words, they wouldn't really be Sanskrit borrowings.



> True, that at a stage Persian influence proved very strong on Urdu for obvious reasons. Most cite the recommendation of Raja Todar Mal, Akbar's "finance minister", for the use of Persian in all administrative activities as the start of this influence. However, that didn't stop borrowings from other languages and Urdu, a living and continually evolving language, is no longer being Persianized in the same manner. If anything,  it is getting more Anglicized! You notice this most obviously when walking the streets of cities as far apart as Lucknow, Old Delhi (Shahjahanabad), Karachi, Lahore, Multan and the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi....and one needs to walk the street to hear the street Urdu and not just read this "expert" or that who, most likely, haven't done the same.



Interesting.  You dispute the Persianization of Urdu even though there is scholarly evidence in support of it, you want to dismiss the views of experts, and want to rely on "street Urdu" without recognizing that there are many variations of the spoken language.  That sounds ridiculous to say the least!

Then there are others who think the only Hindi is MSH and don't acknowledge the presence of colloquial or "street Hindi," while giving a broad definition to Urdu.  Double standard indeed!



> Urdu has always borrowed and continues to borrow from many languages so "free borrowing from Sanskrit" alone is irrelevant.



It's relevant because Sanskrit loans (and not just Prakrit or derived words) form an important part of the other NIA languages, besides Urdu.  And I didn't say Sanskrit _alone_.



> Like other threads we seem to be going round in circles, which means going nowhere!



I think we can all concur with this sentence.  We'll just have to agree to disagree.


----------



## Wolverine9

marrish said:


> and this case of let's call it, negligence, only undermines his authority.



I don't see how it's negligence since it's both Hindi and Urdu as I mentioned earlier. 



> To add insult to injury, the transliteration of the song into Devnagari contains blatant mistakes, one of them being ''samaa'' instead of ''samaaN'' - the word you have referred to just a couple of minutes before in the newest thread as well as wrong gender of one of the nouns.


 
The first is a transliteration error, which may not even be due to his own mistake.  As for the other, many scholars make such mistakes occasionally, even the acclaimed Platts!  It's far-fetched that you would doubt his authority because of this.  But you're entitled to your opinion.


----------



## Qureshpor

Wolverine9 said:


> [...]How self-serving of you!  You promote the views of King as related in reviews (which don't even fully account for the context of his comments in his article) because you believe it helps your agenda, yet you are somewhat dismissive of Snell because he says things that are true which you don't like.
> 
> It certainly is Hindi and not a blatant appropriation of Urdu.  Those lyrics would belong to both languages.  I think you've succumbed to your own propaganda about what Hindi is vis a vis Urdu.


Wolverine9, it seems I should be complaining about your "tone" for using such words as "self-serving" and "propaganda"! 

If "fitnah-garii", "paa-maal", "pahluu" are typical Hindi words, then you are right and I am mistaken. Of course I could list more but this might still suit your purpose to say that they were of  Hindi stock. One thing is for certain. Hasrat Jaipuri has written the word "phuul" and the singer sings it as "phuul" From discussions in this forum, it is quite common amongst Hindi speakers to pronounce this word as "fuul". You can draw your own conclusions from this.


> I think Shackle and Snell were correct in asserting the "insidious simplifications" of some "present Urdu as a bastardized version of Hindi, or alternatively Hindi as some illegitimate offspring of Urdu."
> 
> I don't think anyone in this thread has promoted the view in blue.  However, it seems some are implying or even advocating the view in red, which is quite ludicrous, inaccurate, and grossly irresponsible.


I do not recall anyone either saying or implying this. If some super sensor in your mind is perceiving this, no one else should bear the blame for this.


----------



## Wolverine9

QURESHPOR said:


> Wolverine9, it seems I should be complaining  about your "tone" for using such words as "self-serving" and  "propaganda"!
> 
> If "fitnah-garii", "paa-maal", "pahluu" are typical Hindi words, then  you are right and I am mistaken. Of course I could list more but this  might still suit your purpose to say that they were of  Hindi stock. One  thing is for certain. Hasrat Jaipuri has written the word "phuul" and  the singer sings it as "phuul" From discussions in this forum, it is  quite common amongst Hindi speakers to pronounce this word as "fuul".  You can draw your own conclusions from this.



My apologies for the "tone."  I was just calling a spade what it is: a spade.  All of those words are used in Hindustani and so are a part of both Hindi and Urdu.  _phuul _is the proper word in Hindi and Urdu, as you well know, and a ph/f pronunciation variation doesn't change that.



> I do not recall anyone either saying or implying  this. If some super sensor in your mind is perceiving this, no one else  should bear the blame for this.



It's not about a "super sensor."  It's been implied and directly stated, though not in those exact words of course.  And I've responded to some of it.  Expanding on this any further will probably be off-topic for this thread.


----------



## Qureshpor

Wolverine9 said:


> My apologies for the "tone."  I was just calling a spade what it is: a spade.  All of those words are used in Hindustani and so are a part of both Hindi and Urdu.  _phuul _is the proper word in Hindi and Urdu, as you well know, and a ph/f pronunciation variation doesn't change that.


That's no problem and there was no need for an apology. I too am a greater believer in calling a spade a spade.

Regarding "Hindustani", my views are expressed in the thread "Best way to learn Hindustani" and I won't go into detail here. What I would request from you is to quote a genuine Hindi poet or prose writer who has used these words in his/her writings, if it is possible at all. Remember we are talking about Modern Hindi, not Hindustani which as far as I am concerned was another name for Urdu! This response does not have to be in this thread. A PM will do or even a new thread.


----------



## Wolverine9

Historically, Hindustani was used in various senses, including Urdu (which Platts considers to be a mistaken application).  But I'm using Hindustani in its most common, current sense, and it's what's otherwise referred to as Hindi/Urdu, Urdu/Hindi, etc.  It encompasses all of the words common to both languages.  Words used in Hindustani would be part of both Hindi and Urdu, regardless of origin.  It's also called colloquial Hindi, at least in Indian contexts.

Per your request, I will let you know if/when I get the chance to search literature.


----------



## Faylasoof

@Wolverine9
Two statements can be consistent but still have different implications / meanings! You should read what I wrote!

As to the rest of your above post, it is just going over grounds we've already covered, either in this thread or elsewhere esp. the origin of the division.  I'm not sure if you really understand what is happening to Urdu at present, both at the street level and in official circles in Pakistan, where it is the national language. Urdu is continuing to borrow massively from other languages (English in particular) as it always has and that, btw, is exactly how it came about - enriching the vocabulary of an otherwise rustic KhaRii Bolii. This invigorated language which at various times has been called, Hindavi, Rekhta, Hindustani / Urdu (short for _zabaan-e-urduu-e-mu3allah_) finally replaced Braj as a literary language as well as spreading widely to become the _lingua franca_ of much of the northern region of the subcontinent and even reaching further south. 

It is rather unclear how well you know / understand Urdu or if you are even able to read it. If not, then then that is a pity as you cannot find out for yourself what is going on now. There are indeed pressure groups wishing to Arabicize / further Persianize the language but the language of much of the media, esp. the popular newspapers, and the general public is heading in a completely different direction ....and these do matter! Anglicization is a far bigger issue and as a reaction to it various groups are pushing their own agendas. Furthermore, as a result of Indian TV satellite channels people in Pakistan are getting greater exposure to "shuddh Hindi" words (Urduphones in India have already experienced this for decades) and they too are being incorporated into Urdu. The language is far from static. 

It is pointless to continue with this discussion any further as I feel I shall be wasting of my time, not least because you seem to be lashing out in all directions and keep moving the goalposts!


----------



## Wolverine9

^ I assume "Sanskritic nature" is what's giving you pause about the implication/meaning.  By that I mean the wide use of _tatsama _Sanskrit loans.  This is apparent in the full context of my posts #148 and 150.

And yes, I can read, write, speak, and understand both Urdu and Hindi.

I agree about the overuse of English.  That seems to be a problem plaguing most languages of the subcontinent.  I'm surprised there isn't a thread on Anglicization!

Since the discussion has turned fruitless in general, I also think it's become a waste of time so we'll have to agree to disagree on our points of contention.


----------



## Qureshpor

Wolverine9 said:


> Historically, Hindustani was used in various senses, including Urdu (which Platts considers to be a mistaken application). But I'm using Hindustani in its most common, current sense, and it's what's otherwise referred to as Hindi/Urdu, Urdu/Hindi, etc. It encompasses all of the words common to both languages. Words used in Hindustani would be part of both Hindi and Urdu, regardless of origin. It's also called colloquial Hindi, at least in Indian contexts.
> 
> Per your request, I will let you know if/when I get the chance to search literature.


Well, whatever Platts thought, a large number of authors wrote Hindustani grammars and anyone who knows Urdu will be able to recognise immediately that the texts are indeed Urdu grammars. Most of these are listed in the “Best way to learn Hindustani” thread. A number of them contain reading passages from well known Urdu classics. Platts himself wrote his grammar in 1874 entitled, “A grammar of the Hindustani or Urdu Language”. On the basis “Hindiwaalas” broke away from Urdu, it is ironic that the name “Hindi” caused no offence, considering it too was of “foreign” origins!

Regarding “Hindustani”, this term died on 13/09/1949 and it died because it was taken to be equivalent to Urdu. Please see my post #66 in the “Best way to learn Hindustani“ thread for details. If people still wish to cling onto this term when it suits them, that’s fair enough. The respective languages are now and have been for a long time, Urdu and Hindi. We are told that if KhaRii-Bolii had been left free of its Perso-Arabic element, it too would have incorporated a large amount of borrowings directly from Sanskrit. Urdu is a frequent victim of being called a foreign import for this Perso-Arabic element amongst other things yet when it comes to words such as “fitna-garii” within its vocabulary, the situation quite conveniently becomes, “oh it is “Hindustani”, “Hindi/Urdu”, “Urdu/Hindi”, “Colloquial Hindi”! Classic case of having the best of both worlds! I would just like to remind people that Professor Snell is not teaching “Hindustani” or “Colloquial Hindi” in the link I provided. On the contrary it is literary Hindi that is the subject and there is nothing colloquial about this song penned by Hasrat Jaipuri.


----------



## Wolverine9

^ No one is saying words like _fitna-garii_ belong only to colloquial Hindi and not Urdu.  Why is it hard to believe that they're a part of both languages?  It's akin to doubting whether words like _sukh _and _bhuumi _can be considered Urdu.  If they're used in colloquial Urdu or any form of Urdu then they're a part of the language.

In regards to Hindustani, it is still used in academic, scholarly, and popular usage for the common, everyday vernacular.  You're also likely to read statements such as "The two standardized registers of Hindustani are Modern Standard Hindi and Modern Standard Urdu."  Whether you personally agree with these usages is another story.


----------



## marrish

marrish said:


> I have complied with your request to both listen and read the song, QP SaaHib. I have nothing more to add to what you said about the appropriation of Urdu for the purposes of teaching Hindi, not even having mentioned by mistake which language the song is in. However, leaving Prof. Shackle aside, whom I admire for his contributions to Punjabi scholarship, I feel urged to note it here, for the record, that my respect for the scholarship of Prof. R. Snell is not that high, the opinion of mine which I have aired on the Forum before, *and this case of let's call it, negligence, only undermines his authority.* *To add insult to injury, the transliteration of the song into Devnagari contains blatant mistakes, one of them being ''samaa'' instead of ''samaaN''* - the word you have referred to just a couple of minutes before in the newest thread *as well as wrong gender of one of the nouns.* I'm sure it wouldn't have happened if he took the trouble to transcribe it on basis of the original Urdu text instead of relying on his own listening skills. If anyone is interested in the details, a new thread can be opened or you can contact me by PM.
> 
> 
> Wolverine9 said:
> 
> 
> 
> *I don't see how it's negligence since it's both Hindi and Urdu as I mentioned earlier.*
> 
> *The first is a transliteration error, which may not even be due to his own mistake. As for the other, many scholars make such mistakes occasionally, even the acclaimed Platts! It's far-fetched that you would doubt his authority because of this.* But you're entitled to your opinion.
Click to expand...

*It is to be noted that I used a mild word but apparently it doesn't fit in the ''tone'' the recent discussion has taken. Everybody knows that although Urdu and Hindi are close languages that share most of their basic grammar, specifically verbs, syntax and some other features, still what distinguishes them is the vocabulary, some grammar features and the script. I wouldn't want to dwell on it - it is only for the sake of introduction, which some people reading this thread may appreciate. 
**
Your having mentioned that the song is both Hindi and Urdu is not that weighty to make me concur with this claim, while other participants of this thread have diametrically opposite opinion and last but not least, have been successful in substantiating it.**
*


Wolverine9 said:


> *No one is saying words like fitna-garii belong only to colloquial Hindi and not Urdu. Why is it hard to believe that they're a part of both languages? *It's akin to doubting whether words like _sukh _and _bhuumi _can be considered Urdu. If they're used in colloquial Urdu or any form of Urdu then they're a part of the language.


*I have to agree with it partially. Indeed, no one is saying that fitnah-garii etc. is not an Urdu word. If such statement were to be made, I'd leave it unanswered for obvious reasons. The point of divergence comes with bringing in Hindi, be it colloquial or not. This point is not a matter of believing or doubting but of correct factual information versus disinformation. No matter how credulous people may be, no one would wish to be deluded. The facts are that fitnah-garii فتنہ گری is an Urdu noun par excellence and it is *not* part of Hindi vocabulary so I am not doubting but I'm quite certain about it. Only a reference from any kind of Hindi dictionary would make me ''believe''.
*For your information, _bhuumi_ cannot be considered Urdu nor is used in any form of this language. _sukh_ is and always has been (- but not _su:kh__)_. To reiterate, one needs to substantiate ones argument since blind faith is not a good approach to linguistics in general and to the question of Urdu/Hindi in particular. 

To repeat my stance, and you are right that I'm entitled to my opinion, *these kinds of mistakes are unacceptable when found on a platform for teaching and learning Hindi, under the auspices of a university. The relevant page bears his signature so it matters not if it is his or someone else's howler. A comparison of Platts (more than a century ago) with Snell (present) seems to me a weak argument as Platts rare inaccuracies are of different kind whereas Mr. Snell has all means and resources of the 21st century at his disposal! I would also not say that these mistakes are occasional since I mentioned only two of them which I had found in this very short text of a few verses but there are others too (I won't enumerate them here since it does not change anything. A separate thread was already suggested in case someone is interested). OK, if you'd still insist that it would be far-fetched to doubt his authority, we haven't got to look far, but on the same website, there is something incomparably more worrying: *

http://hindiurduflagship.org/resources/learning-teaching/braj-in-brief/
"Braj Bhasha, an ancestor to modern standard Hindi, was the dialect of the region surrounding Vrindavan [...]"
"Braj in Brief" is HUF Director Rupert Snell's introduction to literary Braj Bhasha, a dialect of Hindi that was widely used for composing poetry from roughly the 16th century until the 19th." 

*No other conclusion can be drawn than that the confusion at the popular and political levels has again obtruded at the academic level again, paraphrasing the words which I quoted in post #141.*


----------



## Wolverine9

^ Some Urdu speakers, including some on this forum, do consider words like _bhuumi _to be a part of Urdu, and that's fine.  So it's not a question of using "blind faith."  Braj Bhasha _is _an ancestor of MSH; it's just not the main basis.  There's a difference.  As far as Braj Bhasha being a dialect or a distinct language, that's a matter of opinion, upon which scholars differ in how to classify the two vis a vis each other.  

There are also many other points you made that I disagree with but I won't list them here because this discussion has grown tiresome.  Otherwise, it's going to keep going in circles and off on different tangents.  Perhaps it was a mistake on my part to offer my opinion in the first place, since that led some to go on the offensive in trying to prove their point, which IMO is representative of a narrow-minded perspective and takes things out of context.  Nonetheless, as I suggested to Faylasoof, let's just agree to disagree.


----------



## Qureshpor

^ I suppose the line of thinking indicated in the quotes below demonstrates the author's broad mindedness admirably!


Wolverine9 said:


> [...]When native writers give their assessments about this topic, one must often read it with a grain of salt. This is not an indictment of their qualifications; rather, their assessment appears to be clouded by an apparent _regret_ over the formation of Modern Hindi. This regret seems to have introduced a bit of bias in their perspective, whether intended or not. Compare the tone of their comments and overall assessment with that of impartial, Western writers (McGregor, Grierson, etc.). There's a significant difference IMO.





Wolverine9 said:


> I don't see how it's "overwhelming." It's a question of accuracy and impartiality, which the Western writers have proven to be more adept in, at least on controversial topics such as these [..].


----------



## Wolverine9

^ And you left out the explanation of my comments as represented below.



Wolverine9 said:


> Not meant to be "stereotypical" or "degrading."  Just illustrating the  point that it's much easier for someone who has no bones in the issue to  give a more accurate and legitimate depiction of what occurred.



So once again, QP, you failed in giving the full context, and are trying to portray me in a way that can be misconstrued.  Nevertheless, I also suggest to you that we agree to disagree on our points of contention.  This discussion has degenerated beyond repair.


----------



## marrish

Wolverine9 said:


> In regards to Hindustani, it is still used in academic, scholarly, and popular usage for the common, everyday vernacular. You're also likely to read statements such as "The two standardized registers of Hindustani are Modern Standard Hindi and Modern Standard Urdu." Whether you personally agree with these usages is another story.


Hindustani? If it is still used in academic contexts, unless in instances of talking of the past, it is not to be followed! I know these kinds of statements are to be found predominantly on Wikipedia. I can't say anything about popular usage... Just thinking how many people in India would call their language ''Hindustani''! ... and I would be very amused to hear a speaker of the everyday vernacular (what an outdated word!) in Pakistan to refer to his or her speech as Hindustani! It would indeed be hilarious if I heard a person connected with the field of language calling someone's language Hindustani, especially that of a Pakistani  !


Wolverine9 said:


> [...] *dispute the Persianization of Urdu even though there is scholarly evidence in support of it, you want to dismiss the views of experts, and want to rely on "street Urdu" without recognizing that there are many variations of the spoken language.* That sounds ridiculous to say the least!
> There was a thread which is now closed and no one came forward with this scholarly or any evidence at all to back this thesis. I would suggest not to make such blanket statements henceforth.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Wolverine9 said:
> 
> 
> 
> Whether it's Khari Boli or Sanskrit, the lexicon is still Indo-Aryan in both cases, with the Khari Boli and Sanskrit forms bearing strong resemblances for many words. That fact alone makes the original Khari Boli more similar to Modern Hindi. Add in the fact that all NIA languages (except Urdu) have freely adopted Sanskrit loanwords historically, and that makes it very likely that the original Khari Boli too would've developed a Sanskritic nature similar to Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, etc. Thus it wouldn't be too different from Modern Standard Hindi in this regard.
> 
> 
> 
> [...]It's relevant because Sanskrit loans (and not just Prakrit or derived words) form an important part of the other NIA languages, besides Urdu. And I didn't say Sanskrit _alone_.
Click to expand...

A real pity! A real pity that Urdu came on the scene and made it impossible and even the efforts at the College of Fort William, of the missionaries and both the colonial and the independent Indian government have not been successful in making Hindi speakers use even a half of the number of Sanskrit words used in those other languages. 

A point to be noted that the ''original KB words'' have not been purged from Urdu and replaced by their Sanskrit counterparts as has been the case with Hindi. Moreover, it appears that the origin of the vocabulary is the problem for you and many others, while more important is the phonology and lexicon and morphology of this Khari Boli.

"In terms of phonology and morphology also, NIA languages show a process of simplification wherein, for example, the often complex consonant clusters of Sanskrit are reduced to more readily pronounceable forms. *Paradoxically, however, the new demands put on NIA languages by twentieth-century contexts of language use has led to an unprecedented reliance on borrowings from Sanskrit and on the coining of neologisms from the inexhaustible stocks of the Sanskrit lexicon. As a result of this process, which is particularly conspicuous in the ‘standardized’ modern forms of Hindi and Bengali, the true NIA quality of these vernaculars tends to be disguised by the high proportion of Sanskrit loanwords. In comparison with Modern Standard Hindi (MSH), then, the Braj Bhasha of the ‘classical’ period of Hindi literature exhibits in relatively chaste form the true vernacular phonology and lexicon of NIA."*
_Braj Bhasha Reader, Dr. Snell._​
This is my attempt to put the record straight since these topics, although loosely related to the subject of this thread were recently introduced. The perception of the facts has much to do with the perspective one hails from but the facts remain facts, whether you are convinced by them or not. Another matter is how one interprets the facts.

And coming back to my previous post:



Wolverine9 said:


> *The first is a transliteration error,* which may not even be due to his own mistake.


I'm glad that in the midst of agreeing to disagree I can but agree with your admitting that the song by Hasrat Jaipuri on Snell's website is transliterated into Devanagari.


----------



## Qureshpor

Wolverine9 said:


> [...] Nevertheless, I also suggest to you that we agree to disagree on our points of contention.  This discussion has degenerated beyond repair.


I have no problem with this. But please note, for an action such as this, do not be surprised at a reaction!​





Wolverine9 said:


> [..] Perhaps it was a mistake on my part to offer my opinion in the first place, since that led some to go on the offensive in trying to prove their point, which IMO is representative of a narrow-minded perspective and takes things out of context. [..]





Wolverine9 said:


> [...]So once again, QP, you failed in giving the full context, and are trying to portray me in a way that can be misconstrued. Nevertheless, I also suggest to you that we agree to disagree on our points of contention. This discussion has degenerated beyond repair.


The context is easily accessible by clicking the icon on the right by the author's name.


----------



## Wolverine9

QURESHPOR said:


> The context is easily accessible by clicking the icon on the right by the author's name.



But you failed to quote the most relevant part of that particular discussion, which is what I quoted.


----------



## marrish

This is your conclusion with regard to my post #165





Wolverine9 said:


> There are also many other points you made that I disagree with but I won't list them here because this discussion has grown tiresome. Otherwise, it's going to keep going in circles and off on different tangents. Perhaps it was a mistake on my part to offer my opinion in the first place, *since that led some to go on the offensive in trying to prove **their point, which IMO is representative of a narrow-minded perspective and takes things out of context*.[...]





Wolverine9 said:


> I'm referring to the conclusions based on small excerpts and quotes because they were often taken out of context!


Your conclusion is not based on a tiny piece of a quote and is abusive indeed while I have tried my best to *prove* my point with scholarly references and linguistic examples. Nothing of an offensive but a simple statement of facts. Do note that I haven't tried to categorize you or any group of people while you have in a very bad way on several occasions. I'm really disappointed.


----------



## Wolverine9

^ Does characterizing a language as a "test tube baby" ring a bell?  That sounds like an insidious and gross simplification.


----------



## marrish

Wolverine9 said:


> ^ Does characterizing a language as a "test tube baby" ring a bell?  That sounds like an insidious and gross simplification.


Yes, it does. In my opinion it is a good figure of speech to refer to the way MSH was conceived in Calcutta and it doesn't bear any abusive connotations nor is _ad personam_.


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## greatbear

It's amusing to find three Urdu speakers with some propaganda in their mind unable to digest some simple facts and arguments given by Wolverine: rather, even when we have all agreed to disagree, they are set upon "a reaction", to use QP's words - which, fortunately, has done nothing except to only bring out in the open with more clarity their hidden agendas for all other readers of this forum, present and future. It would have been nice to hear views of other native speakers like UrduMedium and Chhatr, rather than the same voices again and again, but unfortunately that has not happened.

I don't understand that when there's a plea to agree to disagree, why is the discussion continuing. In addition, members like QP conveniently forget to answer pertinent queries like those in posts 37 and 40: and then go on to quote some scholars out of context (or some members as well). In fact, I was still waiting for their answers, but it seems that asking for answers will be asking for more degeneration rather than direct answers - so why not bury the hatchet and let peace prevail? People who know what's white and what's black will know what's white here and what's black here: why to worry so much about it, eh? If I were Wolverine, I would now stop answering, since the degeneration of this thread might be the very purpose of a couple of members here, unable to defend themselves otherwise.


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