Urdu speakers

[Samar Abbas]

On Fri, 4 Dec 1998, Richard Barz wrote:

> Perhaps the most straightforward way of looking at the linguistic genealogy
> of Hindi and Urdu would be to say that Urdu is a development of the
> Indo-Aryan spoken language of Delhi with an addition of Persian vocabulary
> (which includes a large proportion of Arabic words).

 This would be correct if Urdu arose at Delhi. In fact it arose in Ghazni
in Afghanistan during the reign of Mahmud of Ghazni. So there was no
possibility of any IA influence. The only influence was Iranic, and
thismay have confused some scholars to assume IA influence.

> Hindi stems from 19th
> century Urdu written in Devanagari script with the replacement of much
> Persian vocabulary with borrowings from Sanskrit.

I agree with this.

>
> To the pre-modern literary languages of North India mentioned by  Ruth
> Schmidt one should add Maithili.
>
 Yes, Mithili existed for a very long time and has a rich heritage.

Samar