# Hindi/Urdu: (i)School, (i)Scooter : The Habit of adding 'i' sound before words beginning in Sp/St



## Illuminatus

punjabigator said:
			
		

> <mai.n Iluminatus se sahemat huu.n. pan.jaab me.n bahut log istriiyo.n ko "biibii jii" prayog karte hai.n aur us me.n bahut aadar hot hai


 
I know that Punjabi lacks half-letters and so Scooter becomes sakooter and School becomes sackool. By the way, _istiri _is used in Hindi to mean Iron (as in Ironing clothes), so the sentence was pretty amusing for me. But, today, I was reading an Urdu newspaper, and the word written was Station. To my surprise, it began the word with an alif.

Frankly, people adding the helping vowel (i) before words beginning with St or Sp or Sk (S+Un-voiced plosive) sounds to me as a lack of English training, and is one of those things which makes your English sounds unsophisticated and cheap. 

I was talking to a friend recently, and he pronounced some St word with the helping 'i'. When I pointed this out, he said it was _impossible _to pronounced it without the 'i'. Basically, since he has been using the helper vowel since childhood, he has literally _lost the ability _to pronounce it without it now. He said _Jab station bolte hain to halka sa i sound aa hi jaata hai. _Since he had been brought up in a village environment with limited exposure to English, he had probably never heard the word being pronounced correctly. I had to correctly pronounce several such words before he believed that it was possible for the tongue to even do it without the 'i' sound.

To the point now. How come Urdu _acknowledges _this wrong pronunciation by actually representing it in writing? I was _really _disappointed.


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## Faylasoof

Hi Illuminatus, 

When I was still in school I asked this very question? Why the addition of “i” before _foreign words_ (of _European_ origins) that begin with “s”. Both my teachers and parents said that this was a way, perhaps one might feel a feeble way, to “Urduise” words borrowed from European languages. We never do it with words of old Hindi, Prakrit, Farsi and Arabic. Urdu, like English, is a mongrel language and has always readily borrowed foreign words, sometimes even changing their meaning and usage. 
In an earlier thread I had given examples of how Urdu attempted to adopt absorb words from English, Portuguese, French etc. [ _laaltayn_ from lantern, palait [rhymes with plait] from plate, karnaylfrom colonel.] 

This “i” addition also distinguished us from Punjabi speakers who, as you point out, say _sakool_ etc. and those of my class fellows in school who came from less educated Punjabi families continued to say “sakool “ in English lessons, much to the amusement of the rest.

The fact your friend cannot rid himself / herself of this habit when speaking English is a matter of training of course. I and my family and friends, as well-trained fluent English and Urdu speakers, do not do this. 

BTW, and talking about change of habits (or usage) and / or declining standards, younger Urdu speakers are no longer using “Urdu” alternatives for words like school. When I was still in school we didn’t have to worry about the political incorrectness of calling a school “madrassah”! That too for an English-medium school. 

School = madrassah, (i)skool [written with the “i” but usually pronounced without it by the better educated]
Class = saff , darjah
Section (e.g. primary, secondary ) = fasl
Clothes iron = istiree (same as Hindi – origin?)
Airplane = hawaai jahaaz = Tayyarah [with the Arabic “Taa” or Urdu “To”/ “Toay”
Airport = hawaai addaa
Car = gaaRi / motar gaaRi

Passenger Train = rail gaaRi
Goods train = maal gaaRi
Train engine = …. now this was a challenge. (One of my very keen Urdu 
teachers suggested we resort to using the term “bhag bhag deo”! But 
somehow it never caught on. )

… and more.


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## Illuminatus

Thanks, Faylasoof

Unnecessarily Sanskrit-ising English words is something I have _passionately hated_ and will continue to do. Here, some jobless individuals have taken to the habit of inventing (generating, rather) Hindi names for things like Cricket, TT, Rail, Trains etc. As long as it is done for fun, it is fine, but when they try to flaunt it, it gets on my nerves.

You have all sorts of abominations like _Lauh-path-gamini _(One that runs on an Iron Path) for a train and some other stupid conconctions for sport-names.

My blood boils everytime I hear ...... this.


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## Faylasoof

Yes Illuminatus, I quite agree.   I think we can continue to borrow foreign vocabulary and adapt it to the vernacular(s).   As I said, Urdu has always done this but what I see now is that although the borrwoing into Urdu (and lower register,non-Sanskritised Hindi )continues - mostly from English - we seem to have virtually stopped adapting these words to the vernacular tongues.   Instead, there is quite a flood of English words with no attempt to 'blend' them in.   I think there are limits both ways; no adaptation at all or the other extreme of inventing unnecessarily complicated jargon, as you point out.  We need to perhaps revive the old 'blending habit'.


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## Cilquiestsuens

Well, it is not only about English here, it is simply that the phonology of Urdu doesn't like initial consonant clusters especially with 's' as the first letter....

Look for instance if you ever chance to visit the breathtaking mountainous landscape around Gilgit and Skardu, and look at the way Skardu has been spelt on the boards of the (tiny) airport.... Iskardu (in Urdu)....

Then I don't know why one should be ashamed of one's pronounciation and try to imitate the English one ????? What's the point???? Do you think people having a desi accent in English are inferior ?

Back to the topic, it is funny to see that initial 'T' (the retroflex one) fared 'better' and doesn't need to lean on any vowel : ex: Traali / Traalaa (from trolley)....


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## panjabigator

I think Cilcquiestsuens has hit the nail on the head.  The additional lead-up alif if all about breaking up sound clusters, or at least that was what was explained to me in Lucknow.  I used to think that this preceding alif was an indicator of low, rustic speech, but after going to Lucknow and meeting many educated speakers who purportedly know the _real_ way to speak Urdu, I changed my mind and started to do the same.  Sometimes my parents laugh at me because of this, and it may be also because I resuscitate words that have been long dead for them [i.e., <kaksh> for <claas> (or if you will, <kilaas>)], but it's how I was instructed.  I guess the key thing here is to know your interlocuter well - who to say what word with and who not to.

As it happens, I must confess that my writing of <istrii> above was an unintended error.  I confused <strii> and <istrii> (although I always remember the Hindi for <mo'annis> as <striili.ng>).  Embarrassing!


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## Illuminatus

I think the non-leaning of the word Trolley is attributed more to the following R sound. 

For eg. 

Station needs a vowel, but Sweat doesn't. The W sound is not a Stop. Rather, it is an approximant with a significant vowel character.

EDIT: Incapability to pronounce a sound without a helping vowel is different from deliberately pronouncing the word incorrectly from childhood. If a child born in a Urdu speaking family hears and speaks Istation from Day 1, it is obvious that he will find nothing wrong in it.

I draw a line when Class is turned to Kilaas and so on.



			
				Cilquiestsuens said:
			
		

> Then I don't know why one should be ashamed of one's pronunciation and try to imitate the English one ????? What's the point???? Do you think people having a desi accent in English are inferior?



Cilco, I'm afraid but this sounds typical of forced language rebellion, wherein things are unnecessarily modified just to flout one language's authority. We are pronouncing an English word, and it is absolutely normal for someone to expect that it will be pronounced in as _English-like _a manner as possible (limited by the speaker's phonetic ability). 



			
				Faylasoof said:
			
		

> I’ve noticed that TV presenters (cooks, journalists, reporters etc.) are prone to using less than perfect (standard) Urdu pronunciations, spellings AND grammar! There are many examples one could quote but the following are particularly note worthy: “mamnoon o mashkoor” (incorrect - very common) instead of “mamnoon o mutashakkir” (correct); “inkisaaree” (incorrect - common) instead of “inkisaar” (correct); “laa parwaahee” (completely mutated and really incorrect but quite common) instead of “bay parwaai”(correct but increasingly rare!). Even quite “educated” people these days make the above mistakes. Signs of continuing declining standards of language teaching and learning.



Here we have Faylasoof lamenting on the declining teaching standards. Isn't it the same thing here? When a speaker pronounces a Qaf as Kaf or Toy as Te and so on, you frown and blame it on wrong teaching. Is _this_ not wrong teaching? The correct pronunciation of the word Station is never heard by a child, just like Hindi speakers never hear Qaf.


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## lcfatima

This is not "wrong teaching and learning" but natural development in language, despite how much the language purists hate it and resist it. No language is a mongrel, and English, for example, has just as many non-Anglo Germanic elements as Urdu has amalgamated elements. Language changes and we are witnessing it evolve in front of us. That said, I appreciate natural language change and I am more skeptical of politically motivated language policy changes, since they are often based on villainizing some donor language and community. Like say, the need to weed unwanted Persio-Arabic or English elements out of Hindi. I think protecting Hindi from imperialistic English is still more noble than the sort of anti-Muslim need to weed Persio-Arabic lexicon from Hindi. Yet I am more sympathetic to Bangladeshi Bengalis who push to move towards a less Persio-Arabic/Urdu and a more Sanskritized Bangla. Anyway, I digress.

I realize that these socially constructed concepts of certain people sounding "cheap" and "uneducated" have real social consequences on those people's lives, how others respond to them and even discriminate against them based on their diction and so forth...but from a purely linguistic point of view, there is nothing wrong with dialectical variation, phoneme approximation across, and so forth. I actually find these variations and changes fascinating.

I cooked dopyaaza istew last night. Bara lazeez tha.


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## Cilquiestsuens

lcfatima said:


> I realize that these socially constructed concepts of certain people sounding "cheap" and "uneducated" have real social consequences on those people's lives, how others respond to them and even discriminate against them based on their diction and so forth... *It has also consequences on those discriminating them, and on the whole society. *but from a purely linguistic point of view, there is nothing wrong with dialectical variation, phoneme approximation across, and so forth. I actually find these variations and changes fascinating. *So do I*
> 
> I cooked dopyaaza istew last night. Bara lazeez tha. *YUMMY*


 
hamare haan saag ka season shuroo ho gya. Kal ham ne desi saag khaaya tha, maka'i ki roTii ke saath, roTii par makkhan lagaa ke... Hamaarey ghar mein roz is tarah ka *shfeshal* khaana bantaa hai...


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## lcfatima

By the way, someone once told me *istri/stri* is from a Dutch word or something. Maybe someone knows.


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## Faylasoof

Hello all,

To call declining teaching (and learning) standards as language evolution is simply refusing to accept that there is a problem. I have always recognised the existence of dialects and do not have any qualms with them. They exist. In this very forum we’ve had similar discussions before so I needn’t repeat myself. However, to say that maintaining a high linguistic standard is tantamount to “discriminating” those who speak sub-standard, badly pronounced, grammatically incorrect Urdu is something I strongly disagree with. By all means use your dialects. I myself have spent years trying to find interesting variations of speech in more than one language. But we should learn to know the difference between standard language forms and those that are a result of either bad instructions are even sheer ignorance. I say this as I have met teachers who can’t correctly pronounce Urdu words! What hope for the students then. This is not restricted to one country. Let me give you a really good example: ‘_aql_ (‘ayn-qaaf-laam) = intellect while _akl_ (alif-kaf-laam) = food. Many can’t distinguish between the two and pronounce _aql_ as either _akl _or even _akal_. Many of these speakers also happen to be Muslims and read the Quran (which they insist on calling Kuran – whatever that means) and recite verses like “qul a’oozu bi rabb innaas” (= Say, I take refuge in the Lord of Men / people / beings) as “kul a’uuz bi rabb innaas”!! This is completely meaningless. 

There are other examples too. BP, earlier gave the example of people writing _‘irfaan_ (beginning with _‘ayn_) as _irfaan_ (with _alif _!). Not distinguishing between the sounds of certain letters (_qaaf _vs _kaaf _or _‘ayn_ vs _alif_) illustrates the point well. And let no one accuse me (and others) of being a purist bent on discrimination. We are not trying to prove anything other than the fact that there certain standards which have been flouted because the instructors themselves have no idea. This is about linguistic not social standards or elitism. 

BTW, I admire your enthusiasm for sentences like these:


_I cooked dopyaaza istew last night. Bara lazeez tha_. 

_roTii par makkhan lagaa ke... __Hamaarey ghar mein roz is tarah ka *shfeshal* khaana bantaa hai... _



Great! I’m happy for you! But this is not standard Urdu. I call this “Pidgin Urdu”!!

Going back to what started off this discussion, I have heard arguments like these : “_the phonology of Urdu doesn't like initial consonant clusters especially with 's'”_

Well, I have to disagree. Why this supposed problem the letter “seen”. After all the addition of three dote above it give us “sheen” and many Urdu speakers are quite able to pronounce a word like _shri_ , blissfully unaware that there is a supposed phonological rule about initial consonant clusters and they should change it to “_ishri_”! The same applies to “_pranaam_”. I do not buy this faulty argument as these very words are used by Urdu writers and correctly pronounced by Urdu readers. 

Incidentally, the example of Skardu as “iskardu” (in Urdu) has more to do with following the example of “_iskool_” rather than some inherent anatomical / physiological / psychological impediment to pronouncing initial consonantal clusters. Urdu was introduced in that area quite late and this most likely represents an imitation than anything else.

A final point, and I say this at the _risk of repetition_. I still feel that the addition of an initial “i” has more to do with adapting a foreign word to the vernacular than some obscure rule that 99.9 % of Urdu speakers are either unaware of or simply ignore.


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## Faylasoof

Actually, _istrii_ has no obvious connection with the Dutch word for the clothes iron = “strijkijzer”.


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## Illuminatus

Faylasoof has expressed most of what I feel about Cilco and Icfatima's comments, so I will refrain from repeating it.

However, Faylasoof, the initial consonant cluster thing needs to be looked more phonetically. 

The blanket classification into vowels and consonants is not sufficient to explain it here. 

Even among consonants, we have various types, based on their method of articulation.

1. The problem is that of having a plosive (/k/, /g/, /t/, /d/, /p/, /b/) at second position. I can't think of words which have voiced plosives at second spot, so, for the moment, I am ignoring them. So, we are concerned with /k/, /t/, /p/. Words: Special, Station, Hindi - SpashT (which many people can't pronounce properly. They say iSpashT), Skool (misspelled deliberately), Skill and so on.

2. /r/, /l/, /w/, /j/ are approximants, which have a high vowel nature. Note that the symbol /j/ in the Internation Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents the Ya sound as in Yaad. From Wiki: 





> *Approximants *are speech sounds (phones) that could be regarded as intermediate between vowels and "typical" consonants. In the articulation of approximants, articulatory organs produce a narrowing of the vocal tract, but leave enough space for air to flow without much audible turbulence. Approximants are therefore more open than fricatives. This class of sounds includes lateral approximants like [l], as in lip, and approximants like [j] and [w] in yes and well which correspond closely to vowels and semivowels.



So, there are no pronunciation problems in words like S*w*eater or S*l*ate.

3. Sheen is ONE consonant sound, not two. Phonetically, it is called a Lingua-Palatal fricative. So, all that applied for Seen applies to Sheen as well. Shri has only two Consonant sounds and the second one is a glide, as mentioned earlier.

4. Words like Pranaam are also different because they again have a glide /r/ in the second position and *begin* with a Plosive instead of having a plosive at second spot.

That's the reason I specifically mentioned S + Unvoiced Plosive in my first post.


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## lcfatima

I am just curious as to what you usaatiza think about the regular people, the shop keeper, the math teacher, the Urdu medium educated housewife, the average naukrikarnewalla, or God forbid, the khidmatgar, chaukidaar, etc. who are statistically counted as among the millions of Urdu speakers, but who make the "mistakes" that are discussed above? Or do only the shayer and the falsafi truly speak Urdu?

By the way, there is no /z/ in audhubillah, the zaal is not pronounced as a /z/ in Quranic Arabic, that is poor tajweed.
Also, saying istew dopyaaza would not count as a “pidgin”word by the linguistic definition of what characterizes a pidgin language. Istew is simply a lexical adoption, the word's pronunciation adapted to suit the constraints of the phoneme combinations possible in the adoptive language, as described above.


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## Illuminatus

Icfatima, let me clear my stand on the issue.

I am against deliberate teaching of a wrong pronunciation to new learners on the pretext of Linguistic Evolution.

Everyday, I encounter various accents in which Hindi is being spoken, and they don't hurt me. The fact that some accents sound uneducated to me is something that I can't help. I do not, however, blame them for it. I have found that most people who spoke the wrong pronunciation were not even aware of the right one, and some were even keen to adapt the correct one on being corrected.

Pronouncing Tortoise as Tor-Toys is not language evolution. It is just plain ignorance. I remember that was the way my teacher taught it to me.


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## lcfatima

Actually you are right, no new learner should be taught to say "tor-toys." 

Though I really do have a penchant for folk pronunciations...and a lot of sympathy for those who say tor-toys, I suppose.


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## Illuminatus

On the same lines, I found it annoying that Urdu advocated the wrong pronunciation by using the Alif in writing. That's all.


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## Faylasoof

Icfatima,  your list of ‘regular people’ should also include higher wage earners too. They are also regular guys and they too are prone to speaking grammatically incorrect Urdu!  I repeat, this is not a question of social status but training. Our khidmatgaars, baawarchis and chaukidaars (most semiliterate) in Luckhnow spoke good Urdu because they learnt from their surroundings where there was an emphasis on good language usage.  Dialects? They are great fun and I am very much interested in them.   BTW, I have no idea as to your reference to this: “ .. there is no /z/ in audhubillah, the zaal is not pronounced as a /z/ in Quranic Arabic, that is poor tajweed.”.  If you look carefully at the post above it quotes the following first verse of  Surat-un-Naas as: “qul a’oozu bi rabb innaas”. Here it is in Arabic: قُل اَعُوذ ُ بِرَبِ النّاسِ  .  There is a ‘zaal’. Your criticism above is totally lost on me.But nevermind.


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## Faylasoof

Illuminatus,  I have no issue at all with looking at the consonant clusters in greater detail, just as you present. All very interesting. But at the end of the day my only plea is for good training. We are ALL capable of correctly learning purportedly difficult sounds, sound clusters etc. provided our teachers know what they are teaching. To give you a different example. The Arabic letters ح ع ق ص ض ط ظ are very difficult for many to pronounce properly. For Europeans they are supposed to present special problems, adding to their difficulty of learning Arabic. Yet I’ve met some native Englishman (i.e. white, Caucasians) who pronounce the above letters with the utmost clarity while others not. Mostly it is due to proper training and diligence. We need good teachers – and enthusiastic students.  If the latter are not keen the fault lies mostly with the former. A poor curriculum doesn’t help either.


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## Qureshpor

Faylasoof said:


> Hi Illuminatus,
> 
> When I was still in school I asked this very question? Why the addition of “i” before _foreign words_ (of _European_ origins) that begin with “s”. Both my teachers and parents said that this was a way, perhaps one might feel a feeble way, to “Urduise” words borrowed from European languages. We never do it with words of old Hindi, Prakrit, Farsi and Arabic. Urdu, like English, is a mongrel language and has always readily borrowed foreign words, sometimes even changing their meaning and usage.
> In an earlier thread I had given examples of how Urdu attempted to adopt absorb words from English, Portuguese, French etc. [ _laaltayn_ from lantern, palait [rhymes with plait] from plate, karnaylfrom colonel.]
> 
> This “i” addition also distinguished us from Punjabi speakers who, as you point out, say _sakool_ etc. and those of my class fellows in school who came from less educated Punjabi families continued to say “sakool “ in English lessons, much to the amusement of the rest.
> 
> As Cilquiestsuers SaaHib has indicated, the additional "i" is due to the fact that initial consonant clusters are not supported by Urdu phonetics. As Urdu script is based on the Arabic, the latter does not allow this. A classic example is the addition of the suffix "sta" in pattern X of the Arabic verb, but as it would end up being an initial cluster, a helping "i" is added as in "ista3mala". Professor Finn* Thiesen* in his book "A Manual of Classical Persian Prosody" 1982  Otto Harrassowitz  Wiesbaden states,"..In word-final position Urdu allows only single consonants or clusters with a nasal as thier first element; medially two consonants are allowed; initially only single consonants or clusters with y as their second element are allowed". [e.g pyaar, pyaas, kyaa etc]
> 
> Examples of this "i" abound in Akbar Allahabadi's poetry who we all know probably used more English words in his Urdu poetry than anyone else. Here are a couple of examples.
> 
> hu'e is qadar muhazzab, kabhii ghar kaa muNh nah dekhaa
> kaTii 'umr hoTaloN meN, mare aspataa jaa kar
> 
> chhoR liTrechar ko, apnii hisTarii ko bhuul jaa
> shaiKh-o-masjid se ta'alluq tark kar iskuul jaa
> 
> Whilst Urdu deals with this by the addition of the helping "i" vowel, (e.g. iskuul, ispiich, isTeshan, isTej, gilaas (for glass), kilaas (for class), Punjabi adds an "a" vowel. So, one can be equally amused at both! Have you heard a Geordie pronounce the word "film"? If you have, then you'll know that in that part of the country the word is invariably "filam"!
> 
> Punjabi is not alone in this. Urdu too does not change "clerk" to "kilark" but "kalark", as one can see in the second part of Akbar's qit'ah.
> 
> chaar din kii zindagii hai, koft se kyaa faa'idah
> khaa Dabal roTii, kalarkii kar, Khushii se phuul jaa!
> 
> The fact your friend cannot rid himself / herself of this habit when speaking English is a matter of training of course. I and my family and friends, as well-trained fluent English and Urdu speakers, do not do this.
> 
> I would respectfully suggest that you (and I and others) do not do this (anymore) because of English education's influence on us. You can still hear the "i"/"a" pronunciation even amongst educated people, who either have not had the English language's full impact or are simply oblivious of the fact that they pronounce such clusters with an a/i added
> 
> Interestingly, the vast majority of these initial consonat words appear to be "s" when the second consonat is not "r". When the second consonat is "r", then we do get br/cr/dr/fr/gr/kr/pr/tr.
> 
> As for "shri" and "pranaam", I would suggest that Urdu speakers would have pronounced "shirii" and "parnaam" when Urdu held its sway but the younger generation, under the influence of Hindi have now started to pronounce these words as "shri" and "pranaam". Unless of course someone wanted to demonstrate their Sanskritic pronunciation, then they would have reverted to the shri/pranaam pronunciation. Please note "brahman" is pronounced in Urdu as "barhaman" or "barahman".
> 
> nahiiN kuchh subHah-o-zunnaar ke phande meN giiraa'ii
> vafaadaarii meN shaiKh-o-barhaman kii aazmaa'ish hai
> 
> Ghalib


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## Qureshpor

panjabigator said:


> As it happens, I must confess that my writing of <istrii> above was an unintended error.  I confused <strii> and <istrii> (although I always remember the Hindi for <mo'annis> as <striili.ng>).  Embarrassing!



But even with your misspelling, it is clear that you meant "strii" because you had translated it as "biibii"! Iron (Hindi: istrii, Urdu: istirii/istarii) should not have caused any confusion. Furthermore, could you not have spelt "istrii" for "strii" quite naturally because, possibly, that is the way you might pronounce the word? We must not forget that the consonant clusters existing in the original Sanskrit have been broken up with the intervening vowels in the Sanskrit based languages including Punjabi. Don't the Punjabis pronounce "dharma" as "ta_hram", "Dharmendra" as "ta_hrmindar" etc etc. Could it be that KhaRii-bolii, upon which Urdu is based, had also lost these clusters? The net effect being that a foreign English word is then changed to suit Urdu's own phonology?


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## rahulbemba

Illuminatus said:


> Frankly, people adding the helping vowel (i) before words beginning with St or Sp or Sk (S+Un-voiced plosive) sounds to me as a lack of English training, and is one of those things which makes your English sounds unsophisticated and cheap.



You may be right. In Hindi, the "ee" sound is not used. E.g. scooter is pronounced only as "skootar". I am not sure about Urdu.


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## marrish

lcfatima said:


> By the way, someone once told me *istri/stri* is from a Dutch word or something. Maybe someone knows.


 In Dutch 'to iron clothes, to press' is strijken (ij pronounced as a dyphtong ey). There is a resemblance but IMO no ethymological connection.


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## tonyspeed

Can there be some other explanation than the script not allowing for initial consonant clusters? I met a Nepali person that know nothing of Urdu say "iskool".


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## Qureshpor

tonyspeed said:


> Can there be some other explanation than the script not allowing for initial consonant clusters? I met a Nepali person that know nothing of Urdu say "iskool".





I can't comment about Nepali simply because I don't know anything about the language. I think the script explanation is correct although I do not believe this is the whole story. 

To the best of my knowledge, both Arabic and Persian do not have words with initial clusters. Apart from English, the only main source of such initial cluster words is of course Sanskrit. Words like prem, priit, Krishn etc are "reckoned" in Urdu poetry as if the words were pem, piit and Kishn. In other words pr and kr are considered as two letters fusing to form one consonant. This is in line with Khv (xv) which is considered as a one consonant for purposes of scansion.

brahman is reckoned as bar-haman as well as barahman, as per Persian poetry conventions. 

I think there may be yet another reason. Some Sanskrit words might have lost the initial cluster when we get to the Prakrit stage of language evolution. A large number of such words would have been taken into Urdu via this route as opposed to Hindi taking them directly from Sanskrit.


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## rahulbemba

Illuminatus said:


> Thanks, Faylasoof
> 
> Unnecessarily Sanskrit-ising English words is something I have _passionately hated_ and will continue to do. Here, some jobless individuals have taken to the habit of inventing (generating, rather) Hindi names for things like Cricket, TT, Rail, Trains etc. As long as it is done for fun, it is fine, but when they try to flaunt it, it gets on my nerves.
> 
> You have all sorts of abominations like _Lauh-path-gamini _(One that runs on an Iron Path) for a train and some other stupid conconctions for sport-names.
> 
> My blood boils everytime I hear .... this.



This is highly offensive dear Illuminatus.


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