VikingRaider
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I deleted question lol , I was thinking of asking it again in whatever thread, but you already answered.Original form was just Hindustani. Add a little persian vocab, you get Urdu. Add more sanskrit vocab, you get Hindi. But you have lot of persian and sanskrit vocab in both to begin with....even in very basic common words. You have to go very formal to find enough difference, but even then its simply a point of vocab, and most people who know one would know other words to use to make it more understandable to others (i.e the lingua franca is not the highest formality version).
Nothing was really standardised in delineated way as pure/original Hindi and pure/original Urdu....so their mutual intelligibility is very high (in spoken form)...just like other dialects of Hindustani. Grammar is near identical...and differences like yah vs ye...vah vs voh etc.. are very dialect kind of difference (I can tell you differences like this in Tamil too).
It is the reverse of say Mandarin/Cantonese...which share the same script (down to the word/text...i.e the written forms are exact same for the same thing you are writing) but are spoken completely differently....in so far they are different languages (because mutual spoken intelligibility is very low).
Brahmi (specifically the earliest forms) is older script than Devanagari....so it is likeliest candidate for earliest written sanskrit (highest formal register) and all the prakrits of the Indic languages of the time. Sanskrit/prakrit have no native original script in that they were only spoken/heard languages originally.
Kharoshti was another script of the time...shares some of the same origins (whatever they are) but different enough to be side-side competition with Brahmi. I guess whichever one influences a particular region/kingdom first became more prevalent in that area. Remember it was really 0.1% of the people (scholars etc.) who commited to learning and writing at that point in time...(and hence the subject material was the highest stuff deemed to be worthy enough to be passed on...thus this limits somewhat the extent of clues we have to make the precise chronological links).
Nagari and later devanagari later subsumed the use of Brahmi for written sanskrit (when we talk of written Vedas etc). But if you look at say Edicts of Ashoka pillar etc, its in Brahmi script...nagari simply had not been invented yet. In fact it was Gupta dynasty (and their brahmi script i.e gupta script) that is the bridge between Brahmi and Nagari script. Much like Siddham is for Brahmi and Bengali script etc..
Brahmi + kharoshti origins are currently being studied and is ongoing debate. There is probably a mix of what came via trade routes from the Middle East (i.e proto phoenician/aramaic etc) script wise and some local developed stuff. There are theories that speculate fully one or the other too...it may never be resolved. Contrast with China where there was much the same situation (multiple scripts/glpyhs competing early...similar to brahmi vs kharoshti and their near descendants etc.... that came from the same original sources but slight regional differences too) but was standardised into only one accepted one by the Emperor Qin (Qin is where word China comes from).
Okay thanks now let me read carefully .