Hindi/Sanskrit/Urdu

[Aditya, the Cheerful Hindu Skeptic]

Swaminathan Madhuresan <smadhuresan at YAHOO.COM> has written as follows:

>> It is the East India Co. and Gilchrist which invented `Hindi' and
>>`Hindustani' as a Sanskritised form of Urdu. They and the pundits referred
>>to these as `Hindee' and `Hindoostanee'.
It was in the nature of British academics to invent new spellings and words
to look down the native speakers and only now we are slowly reverting to
natural spellings from such constructions as "Cawnpore", "Peking",
"Singapore" etc imposed by the  British whose hearing was not attuned to the
voice of the local subjects.

The difference in US and UK English is also mainly the attempt to get rid of
some weirdness of their spellings. The  acceptance of US form
internationally is due to its being more logical.

> In some book, I read that the  sanskritized high Hindi is called RaghuvIri,
> named after the Chairman of the Commission that created official
> Hindi for administrtative purposes like radio. It was in Pundit Nehru times.

I do remember Prof. Raghubir who had inherited the ignoble spirit of the
British pseudo scholars and  compiled several dictionaries in every field of
study  by coining new terms instead of adopting from other language. He had
new names and symbols for all the elements of Periodic table regardless of
who discovered them. He did not even like greek letters used in Mathematics
and dy/dx etc. I do not know the source of his funding but it seems unlikely
that Nehru would have approved him.

There are still many demagog politicians in India who want to impose his
invention on the poor voters but send their own children to English medium
schools and prepare for TOEFL tests.

Have a peaceful and joyous day.
Aditya Mishra
Primary email: a018967t at bc.seflin.org
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