scionoftheindus
BANNED
- Joined
- May 17, 2015
- Messages
- 1,226
- Reaction score
- -14
- Country
- Location
written by a quora user (pankaj vaishnavi)
There was no mention of a language called "Urdu" before the early 18th century CE.
"Urdu" is simply used as an appellation, i.e. a label, for the Persianized register of the common speech of the Indo-Gangetic plains, otherwise known since the 12th century CE as Hindi or Hindavi.
So, to answer your question, Urdu is (though not limited to) what you'd call Hindi written in Nastaliq. The common so-called Urdu speech is in the same register as the commonly spoken Hindi. More ketabi (bookish) versions of Urdu pepper the language with a lot of lexicon from Arabic or Persian, but the verbs, conjunctions, prepositions etc still remain Indic. A parallel development to Sanskritize Hindi also took place from the early 19th century.
The grammars of Hindi and Urdu are now taught differently, though from a linguistics stand-point there is no actual difference. Eg. Urdu purists will argue that Urdu uses the Persian ezafe scheme to qualify nouns or simply as a genitive case, which does not exist in Hindi. However, that just stems from a lack of understanding of linguistics.
E.g. "hafteh-ye gozashteh" in Farsi means "week of past", i.e. 'last week', or "khwaher-ye taan" which means "sister of yours". Formal usage of Urdu may use this -e scheme to suffix qualifiers to nouns, but both the qualifier/adjective and the noun in such cases will be borrowed words. In other words, the entire ezafe-d structure is lifted from Farsi as a single root morpheme. This makes Urdu different from Hindi only very superficially. True assimilation/innovation of ezafe in Urdu (which has never happened) would imply its usage for any qualifier or noun, including native ones. E.g. no Urdu speaker could ever say "subh-e suhaani" (where "suhaani"= pleasant is the native Urdu/Hindi word) to mean a "pleasant morning" with a straight face. The correct Urdu usage must be "suhaani subah", with the adjective "suhaani" preceding the noun "subah" - just like how a Hindi speaker would construct it.
One funny exception to this general lack of innovation in ezafat in Urdu is the purists' zeal to add the ezafe in all foreign structures, whether it makes sense or not. E.g. constructions like "Ibn-e Khaldoon" or "Ibn-e Batuta" are tautological, because "Ibn" (in Arabic) already carries the meaning "son-of" or "descendant-of". Faulty constructions like these occur because most Urdu speakers (including the "purists") couldn't distinguish between the Arabic and Persian grammars - and treated anything foreign in the same ham-handed, half-digested manner.
Another difference between Hindi and Urdu touted by little-knowing purists is the difference in functional vocabulary. Eg. Any one of these marzban-haye pakeezegi-ye zobaan-e Urdu would immediately pronounce the following sentence:
"Mujhey aapki-behen-key bazaar-mein deedar huey" (Lit. trans. "to-me your sister's in-the-bazaar sight happened")
to be indisputably in Urdu, not Hindi. Their claim hangs on the use of the word "deedar" (literally meaning "sight"), which they'd proclaim is an Urdu word - i.e. a Persian borrowing used only in Urdu. What these people do not recognize is that all they are doing is writing Hindi in passive voice to accomodate a foreign noun in it. Ask them to convert this into active voice and the answer would be EXACTLY the same as a Hindi speaker would speak in the first instance: "Mainey aapki behen ko bazaar mein dekha", employing the Hindi verb "dekhna" (to see).
Their claim of Urdu being truly different would've held more water if the Urdu speakers had actually used the verb for seeing from Farsi, i.e. "deed" (to see), which is the root morpheme for "deedar". But, as with the first example, a sentence like:
"Mainey aapki behen ko bazaar mein deeda"
would be followed by peals of laughter from the amused listeners! In Farsi, though, "khwaher-ye tan dar bazaar deedam", using the inflected verb "deed" makes perfect sense.
Note that English, which underwent a similar phase of borrowing from French, also displays similar characteristics. In fact, the influence of Norman French on the structure of English was much deeper in comparison with Farsi/Arabic's influence on Urdu. English even borrows many of its commonly used verbs from Norman French, e.g. "create", "destroy", "count", "describe" etc., whereas verb loanwords from Farsi to Urdu are a total rarity.
However, English was largely spared of this Urdu-syndrome that afflicts the sub-continent because of a lack of an analogous socio-political cleavage in the English-speaking mainland. I sometimes wonder how fortunate the English were in that respect. If anything like the Urdu purists had existed in the English speaking world, they would've said something like:
"Retardation happened to me enroute to école",
instead of
"I was late on my way to school".
--
My answer specifically takes the Urdu purists apart because the question was about Urdu, though the same argument can be applied to "shuddh" Hindi - the similar and parallel development to Sanskritise Hindi, which is as laughable.
Fortunately, Hindi-Urdu are native to India and the sheer phenotypic variation in the entire dialect cluster ensures that such top-down control of Hindi remains skin deep. Indians who speak in a Sanskritized affectation in normal lives will immediately pay the price in unconcealed laughter. In Pakistan, however, Urduization takes a much more sinister and deeply political form - which is outside the purview of the question above.
There was no mention of a language called "Urdu" before the early 18th century CE.
"Urdu" is simply used as an appellation, i.e. a label, for the Persianized register of the common speech of the Indo-Gangetic plains, otherwise known since the 12th century CE as Hindi or Hindavi.
So, to answer your question, Urdu is (though not limited to) what you'd call Hindi written in Nastaliq. The common so-called Urdu speech is in the same register as the commonly spoken Hindi. More ketabi (bookish) versions of Urdu pepper the language with a lot of lexicon from Arabic or Persian, but the verbs, conjunctions, prepositions etc still remain Indic. A parallel development to Sanskritize Hindi also took place from the early 19th century.
The grammars of Hindi and Urdu are now taught differently, though from a linguistics stand-point there is no actual difference. Eg. Urdu purists will argue that Urdu uses the Persian ezafe scheme to qualify nouns or simply as a genitive case, which does not exist in Hindi. However, that just stems from a lack of understanding of linguistics.
E.g. "hafteh-ye gozashteh" in Farsi means "week of past", i.e. 'last week', or "khwaher-ye taan" which means "sister of yours". Formal usage of Urdu may use this -e scheme to suffix qualifiers to nouns, but both the qualifier/adjective and the noun in such cases will be borrowed words. In other words, the entire ezafe-d structure is lifted from Farsi as a single root morpheme. This makes Urdu different from Hindi only very superficially. True assimilation/innovation of ezafe in Urdu (which has never happened) would imply its usage for any qualifier or noun, including native ones. E.g. no Urdu speaker could ever say "subh-e suhaani" (where "suhaani"= pleasant is the native Urdu/Hindi word) to mean a "pleasant morning" with a straight face. The correct Urdu usage must be "suhaani subah", with the adjective "suhaani" preceding the noun "subah" - just like how a Hindi speaker would construct it.
One funny exception to this general lack of innovation in ezafat in Urdu is the purists' zeal to add the ezafe in all foreign structures, whether it makes sense or not. E.g. constructions like "Ibn-e Khaldoon" or "Ibn-e Batuta" are tautological, because "Ibn" (in Arabic) already carries the meaning "son-of" or "descendant-of". Faulty constructions like these occur because most Urdu speakers (including the "purists") couldn't distinguish between the Arabic and Persian grammars - and treated anything foreign in the same ham-handed, half-digested manner.
Another difference between Hindi and Urdu touted by little-knowing purists is the difference in functional vocabulary. Eg. Any one of these marzban-haye pakeezegi-ye zobaan-e Urdu would immediately pronounce the following sentence:
"Mujhey aapki-behen-key bazaar-mein deedar huey" (Lit. trans. "to-me your sister's in-the-bazaar sight happened")
to be indisputably in Urdu, not Hindi. Their claim hangs on the use of the word "deedar" (literally meaning "sight"), which they'd proclaim is an Urdu word - i.e. a Persian borrowing used only in Urdu. What these people do not recognize is that all they are doing is writing Hindi in passive voice to accomodate a foreign noun in it. Ask them to convert this into active voice and the answer would be EXACTLY the same as a Hindi speaker would speak in the first instance: "Mainey aapki behen ko bazaar mein dekha", employing the Hindi verb "dekhna" (to see).
Their claim of Urdu being truly different would've held more water if the Urdu speakers had actually used the verb for seeing from Farsi, i.e. "deed" (to see), which is the root morpheme for "deedar". But, as with the first example, a sentence like:
"Mainey aapki behen ko bazaar mein deeda"
would be followed by peals of laughter from the amused listeners! In Farsi, though, "khwaher-ye tan dar bazaar deedam", using the inflected verb "deed" makes perfect sense.
Note that English, which underwent a similar phase of borrowing from French, also displays similar characteristics. In fact, the influence of Norman French on the structure of English was much deeper in comparison with Farsi/Arabic's influence on Urdu. English even borrows many of its commonly used verbs from Norman French, e.g. "create", "destroy", "count", "describe" etc., whereas verb loanwords from Farsi to Urdu are a total rarity.
However, English was largely spared of this Urdu-syndrome that afflicts the sub-continent because of a lack of an analogous socio-political cleavage in the English-speaking mainland. I sometimes wonder how fortunate the English were in that respect. If anything like the Urdu purists had existed in the English speaking world, they would've said something like:
"Retardation happened to me enroute to école",
instead of
"I was late on my way to school".
--
My answer specifically takes the Urdu purists apart because the question was about Urdu, though the same argument can be applied to "shuddh" Hindi - the similar and parallel development to Sanskritise Hindi, which is as laughable.
Fortunately, Hindi-Urdu are native to India and the sheer phenotypic variation in the entire dialect cluster ensures that such top-down control of Hindi remains skin deep. Indians who speak in a Sanskritized affectation in normal lives will immediately pay the price in unconcealed laughter. In Pakistan, however, Urduization takes a much more sinister and deeply political form - which is outside the purview of the question above.
in writing both are different, in official writing Urdu use words which can give headache to normal Indian people who dont know much urdu...
whereas poor Pakistanis got kicked out of Bangladesh trying to do the same thing there 
