SV: Urdu/hindi

[Luis Gonzalez-Reimann]

At 05:28 PM 09/03/2000 +0200, Lars Martin Fosse wrote:

>spoken. What usually happens is that conquerors contribute with vocabulary
>to the existing local language: just look at all the French in English,

Or, maybe more to the point, all the Arabic words in Spanish.  Many Spanish
words that begin with "al" are Arabic imports that preserved the
Arabic article:

alfiler
alfombra
almacen
alcazar
almohada
albondiga
alberca
...etc.

Plus other common words such as "ojala, ("hopefully," "I hope so") which
originally means "Allah willing."

LMF:
>vocabulary dumped by an invading French army that took control of England.

In the case of Spanish, by the invading Moors that controlled most of
modern-day Spain for centuries.

LMF:
>The same thing happened to that particular Prakrit that became Urdu.

Mozarabic, the archaic Spanish spoken for centuries in the areas under
Muslim domination, had many Arabic words but preserved its Romance (Vulgar
Latin) grammar and sound system, just like Urdu preserved its Indo-Aryan
ones.  After the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in the 15th c. Spanish
became increasingly latinized, just as after partition Hindi became more
sanskritized and Urdu more arabicized and persianized.

Best,

Luis Gonzalez-Reimann
University of California, Berkeley