Nehru and Persian/Arabic

[Th. de Bruijn]

>  A thorough knowledge of Arabic and Persian eases understanding of their
> derivative, Hindustani, which is the third most widely used language in
> the world, is the de facto lingua franca and effective national language
> of India and understood by more than half of all Indians. Hence their
> status as classical languages: like classical Latin giving birth to the
> modern Romance languages, Classical Arabic and Persian gave birth to Urdu
> and its derivative Hindustani. Hence their status as Classical Languages
> par excellence of the bulk of the Indian population.
>
>  Moreover, a person speaking Hindustani can easily understand and write
> Arabic and or Persian with very little effort, while learning other
> classical languages is more difficult, but may be suitable for minorities.
>

You're right, but I would agree with Ganesan that Tamil deserves
classification as a classical language.

Regards,
Paul Kekai Manansala

Dear Indology-readers,

Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani is a complex Modern Indo-Aryan language and deserves to be treated as such by Indological scholars. On the topic which started off this thread: Nehru was very fond of Persian poetry, which he probably knew better than his English or Hindi. Could that have been of any influence, apart from the fact that a substantial portion of the literature that was made in India (is that the same as Indian literature?) is written in Persian?

The essence of the quote (see above) alludes me and seems to take up more bandwidth than its relevance would justify. It's no use going over debates again and again, but, just for the record, the statement that Urdu or Hindustani is derived from Persian or Arabic does not make any sense linguistically. Statements like that are part of the discourse of linguistic politics and not of that of Indology. For students of Hindi and Urdu it proves just as big a pain to learn Arabic as for any other, I can tell from experience. Persian is another matter, but my background in Sanskrit helped me more with that than my Hindi. 

Vocabulary, and that is what Ar. Pe. and Hi/Ur/Hindustani have in common, is only part of language and even in that there are a lot of "Falsche Freunde" as the Germans say: similar words in different languages that do not have similar meanings. Here old de Saussure and his "langue" and "parole" also kick in. One has to learn to use the vocabulary in its syntactic and linguistic context. This makes that it is not easier for anyone who knows Hindi/Urdu to learn Arabic if only at a very basic level, let alone read poetry or any other sophisticated and highly contextualized forms of speech.

A good example is the famous Persian dictionary by Steingass. It is a preferred tool for students of Arabic as it is not based on the roots of verbs, like the Arabic dictionaries, but gives all the inflected participles and mazdars separately. The trap lies in choosing the right meaning from the many alternatives. The specific context of the Persian language is the clue to what its compiler meant, making the dictionary very impracticle for reading modern Urdu. After a while the systematic nature of the Arabic dictionary, once mastered, is a much better tool for learning Arabic (and an Urdu dictionary is better for Urdu). A similar case would be the use of Monier Williams for looking up tatsamas in Hindi. 

Exceptions may be strictly technical vocabularies such as that of Koranic Arabic. But even there: Abu'l Kalam Azad made a translations into Urdu of the Koran, not because it could be read easily by all Urdu speakers.

Greetings,
Thomas de Bruijn
IIAS\Leiden University
The Netherlands