interesting experience

[Richard Barz]

Dear Stephen,

In terms of written language, Urdu is written in the Arabic-Persian derived
Urdu script and Hindi is in the Indian devanagari script.

In terms of spoken language, Urdu descends from the Hindui or Hindi
Indo-Aryan regional vernacular of the Delhi-Meerut area.  Urdu has a lot of
Persian and Arabic vocabulary in addition to its native vocabulary.  Modern
standard Hindi is Urdu written in devanagari script with a lot of the
Arabic and Persian vocabulary replaced by Sanskrit loanwords.

namaste,
Richard Barz
ANU
Canberra

At 08:09 PM 8/30/00 -0400, you wrote:
>Friends;
>
>As an amatuer indologist (and now a laboring sanskrit student) i always
pay close attention to all my encounters with Indian culture.  This past
weekend i was at my local convenience store where the clerk has become a
good aquaintence over the past year.( he was born and raised in India)  I
was telling him of my travel plans for this fall and my intention of
learning rudimentary hindi so that i could communicate better when in major
cities in the north.  His response was immediatly shocking to me.  He told
me at great length how though most people believe they are speaking hindi,
they are actually speaking Urduu.  This seems a bit of a rediculous claim
considering that none of the hindi liturature i have seen displays an
arabic alphabet. so my question is this: is there any value to this claim?
Also, is this a reletively common claim?
>
>Namaskar
>
>Stephen J Brown
>University of Rochester.
>