Nehru and Persian/Arabic

[Samar Abbas]

Thomas de Bruijn wrote:
> For students of Hindi and
> Urdu it proves just as big a pain to learn Arabic as for any other,

 Yet Hindi films are widely screened in the Arab world. Some are dubbed,
but many ARE NOT. Arabs can easily understand Hindustani after watching a
few Hindi films. The same goes vice versa.
 `Pure Urdu' (good ones) dictionaries contain only Arabic and Persian
words, and the script is the same.
  For students of French and Spanish it proves just as big a pain to learn
Latin as those of Hindustani to learn New Persian.

> I can tell from experience.

 Did you learn Khari Boli first or Urdu ? From your statement below I see
that you are a student of Sanskrit (that explains many things)

> Persian is another matter, but my
> background in Sanskrit helped me more with that than my Hindi.

So Persian and Arabic are also derived from Sanskrit ?

> Vocabulary, and that is what Ar. Pe. and Hi/Ur/Hindustani have in
> common,

So we agree that vocabulary is 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 d e 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,

It is easy at a very basic level. Of course, poetry is a different
question. It is also difficult for a Frenchman to learn Latin poetry, as
it is for a Tamil to read Old Tamil poetry.

> let alon e read poetry or any other sophisticated and highly
> contextualized forms of speech.

I think you, an English speaker, will find Anglo-Saxon poetry quite
involved. You may also require an English - Anglo-Saxon dictionary.

>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 li es 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 Ar abic dictionary, once mastered, is a much better tool
>for
>learning Arabic (and an Urdu dictionary is better for Urdu).

Just like a French dictionary is better for learning French than a Latin
dictionary is for learning French.

> A similar
>case would be the use of Monier Williams for looking up tatsamas in
>Hindi.

What is this `tatsamas in Hindi' ? Sanskritisation is a very late process
in the history of Hindi, occurring in the late 19th centrury due to the
upsurge in Vaishnava fundamentalism. It seems you are confusing Khari
Boli, Braj Bhasa etc. (which are Prakrits, and have a substantial tatsama
element) with Hindustani. The former are almost dead, having been replaced
by Hindustani. Of course, a person who has learned Khari Boli or Braj
will not be able to understand any Arabic. Hindustani has a negligible
tatsama element.
 I can refer you to Madan Gopal's `This Hindi and Dev Nagari' for showing
linguistically that there are no tatsamas in original Hindi. In fact,
Bengali originally did not have any tatsamas (only 5 % of them). The % of
Sanskrit increased till a climax in the 19th century. ( cf.
S.K.Chatterjee, Origin and Development of the Bengali Language) So in both
Hindustani and Bengali (and many other Indian languages) we find a marked
increase in Sanskritisation in the 19th century. Nagari Hindi is derived
from Hindustani, which is in turn derived from Urdu. Nagari Hindi is thus
an artificial language created in the 19th century. Unfortunately, they
left the Perso-Arabic word `Hindi' as the name of the language, thereby
betraying its true origins.

 I think you have seen some Sanskrit dictionaries masquerading as Hindi
ones. One can also find such ones for Bengali etc. I can also find
Latinised dictionaries for English, and then claim that English is derived
from Latin and is not a Germanic language. So finding Sanskritised
dictionaries of Hindustani does not mean that Hindi is derived from
Sanskrit.

> 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.

 The Bible was also translated into French, Spanish etc. from Latin. That
does not mean that French, Italian etc. are not derived from Latin.

>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 o r Arabic does not make any sense
>linguistically.

 I won;t repeat what I have already stated, any interested readers are
referred to the archives. Basically, I say that Hindustani belongs to the
Iranian subgroup of Indo-Iranian langauges and is derived from New
Persian, an event which occurred in the camps (Urdus) of Mahumd of
Ghazni.

>Statements like that are part of the discourse of
>linguistic politics and not of that of Indology.

  Then so should Kak's statements on this list attempting to prove that
Dravidian languages are derived from Sanskrit, and his threads on Vedic
Anatolia, etc. They took up much more bandwidth, yet are somehow not the
cause of any concern.

> 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?

 That is the same as Indian literature if the literature that was made in
America, written as English, counts as American literature. If you wish to
define American literature as comprising only that in Sioux, Iroquois
etc., then that is your definition.

 Is literture written in Dutch in The Netherlands the same as Netherlandic
literature ?
  Or is it just the literature in Celtic, the language spoken in the
Netherlands before the Germanic peoples invaded, exterminating the Celts?
  Or is it just Latin literature produced in Holland, the language of the
civilised Romans, before they were massacred by the Dutch Germanic invaders ?
  Is Dutch derived from the pre-Germanic Celtic
and Latin ? Its script is Latin, just as is all its scientific literature.

At least Urdu kept its script and vocabulary.

 Is English literature created in Britain the same thing as British
literature ? Or is British literature only the literature of the Celts
(Scottish, Cornish, Irish etc.) before they were exterminated by the
barbaric Germanic Anglo-Saxon invaders ?

Samar