SV: Urdu/hindi

[Naseem Hines]

AND ALCOHOL!

On Mon, 4 Sep 2000, Luis Gonzalez-Reimann wrote:

> 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
>