yes, good point.

I think a great analogy is with Turkish. The literary language of Turkey used to be Ottoman Turkish

Your analogy seems to be a good one.

The difference is, Gaelic and English are two totally different languages; Taiwanese and Mandarin are as well. Urdu and Hindi on the other hand are at heart the same language, just with different scripts and different (albeit overlapping) vocabulary sets. These differences in vocabulary become more apparent in formal situations; colloquial versions of Urdu and urban Hindi are very close if not almost identical. And the average Hindi speaker uses quite a lot of Urdu words and vice versa.

I think a great analogy is with Turkish. The literary language of Turkey used to be Ottoman Turkish. It had a Turkish base with a large amount of PersoArabic vocabulary, and was written in a version of the Arabic script. Certain people in power in Turkey decided in the early 20th century (or possibly earlier) to remove all the PersoArabic elements and replace them with pure Turkish words (or coin new Turkish words if necessary). And to write this language in Roman (English) script. Within a generation people forgot Ottoman Turkish. It is largely an incomprehensible and unreadable language for, pardon the expression, young turks. I would say Urdu bears the same relationship with Modern Standard Hindi that Ottoman Turkish bears with Modern Standard Turkish. Now, to extrapolate further, Turkish is mutually comprehensible with a number of other ‘Turkic’ languages, such as Azeri (spoken in Azerbaijan). Azeri probably bears the same relationship to Turkish that dialects like Braj and Awadhi do to Standard Hindi.

What I am writing here is a simplified version. I hope my fellow commentators won’t find anthing abhorrent/colonialistic in it.

I didn’t quite understand your story about the Hindus speaking rudely about Muslims….b/c I’m sure as My Dog Jagat said, jerks can come in all religions and not just Hindus.

I think your assertions might be touchy b/c you aren’t South Asian…although you are Polish and not British, in Asia you would be considered white, so I guess it’s somewhat natural for some South asians to be dismissive. But that’s not to say that your ethnic, national background doesn’t mean that you don’t have valid points. I’m just saying it, some people might dismiss your opinion as a first reaction.

You said you are Polish so perhaps the comparison would be if on a Polish blog, Russians or Germans started telling you what languages should take precedence in your country. Knowing German, Prussia’s and Russia’s long history of conquest and hegemony over Poland, I can understand if some Polish people would be suspicious of people who had formerly conquered them, killed about 6 million during wwII, telling them how they should linguistically run their country?

Has there been language wars in Poland? Any attempt to force Russian or German languages?

Can this whole Hindu/Urdu thing be compared to some extent to Ireland or Taiwan? For centuries Irish people were conquered and exploited by the British and now Ireland is making a concerted effort to bring back Gaelic…even though English is very much their language (If some Irish feel differently about what I wrote, it’s just my opinion) or in Taiwan, where indigenous Taiwanese language was suppressed for Mandarin, and some of those who are ethnic Taiwanese resent the use of Mandarin?

A book that is over 30 years and based on events hundreds of years old, but somehow we are supposed to buy into his arguments hook, line and sinker for the present age.

I guess it hasn’t dawned on people that there are some of us who were born at a time when we just didn’t experience what Said said we did, or what Said says we are supposed to, even though he said it over 3 decades ago.

Enough Said!

Akbar was a muslim ruler who had respect for Hindu culture and himself followed a sort of Hindu-Muslim fusion synthesis. There are several tales of him patronizing Hindu saints in the Braj region.

Urdu is a beautiful and poetic language no doubt. I have some urdu ghazal cds and even though I don’t know most of what they are saying, it sounds incredibly romantic.

Regarding Tamil. Maybe the “pure” form of Tamil does not use Sanskrit words? Or maybe those words were originally Tamil to beginwith but got subsumed later into Sanskrit?

Being that Sanskrit is supposed to be the language of the Vedas and “vedic culture” is preserved to a large extent in Tamil culture, that is why there appears to be so much Sanskrit in Tamil language. So then the question could be asked, was the area known today as Tamil Nadu the original seat of ancient vedic culture and not the north as most are led to believe?

Wiki also makes the point that because Khari-boli was based around Delhi, it came to be seen as more urbane and sophisticated than other dialects of Hindi such as Avadi and Braj Bhasa.

About the word “sahib” having colonialist connotations, I don’t really think so. When I was in Pakistan, I added Sahab to people’s names (for example, university officials) out of politeness. I see it as being analgous to “Mr” or “Sir”. That said, I can see that for some people when it comes to Indian-White relations, someone calling themselves by that title might make some people a little uncomfortable.

First of all let me make it clear your ethnicity does not matter to me. You obviously have a more educated and nuanced point of view than many a narrow-minded speaker of either Urdu or Hindi.

But, I disagree that Urdu is older than Hindi. Urdu IS indeed older than modern standard Hindi as used in India today. But that’s it. It’s not older than any other variety of Hindi. Hindi varieties such as Braj, Awadhi, Khari Boli etc. predate Urdu. You can not say that Braj is not Hindi. It is certainly part of the Hindi language family. So is Awadhi. So is Haryanvi. Admittedly there are other languages/dialects lumped under Hindi where the relationship is much less close (such as Marwari or Bhojpuri, which on linguistic grounds alone can be considered fairly distinct from Hindi). Punjabi is actually a lot closer to colloquial Hindi than Marwari is to colloquial Hindi for example.

In any case, khari boli’s heartland, even more than Delhi, is in the districts of western Uttar Pradesh that are right next to Delhi (think Meerut, etc.) Hindu villagers living there were speaking rural forms of Khari boli for a long time before formal Urdu came to exist. You could say it was a rough, raw, rustic Urdu precursor, without the huge PersoArabic vocabulary that entered later. And it was most certainly a form of Hindi. It does not matter if it was labelled as such back then, but in retrospect that’s waht it was. Of course it was unpolished and unwritten back then, just a spoken dialect.

my parents and their fellow tamilians had always made it out to seem that tamil is the least sanskritized language. but when i studied hindi, i realised that the sanskritized forms of the words in the standard literary form of hindi were a lot closer to their counterparts in tamil. the reason this was not obvious is because hindustani is what is heard and that resembles sanskrit to a much lesser extent. which begs the question whether tamil is really heavily sanskritized aka which way did the influence go? and yoga fire is right – this is a highly taboo topic. i tried sharing my newfound knowledge, only be to have it dubbed ‘propoganda’ by the tamils.

The problem is sometimes one can get confused, forget what r sounds like, and get totally tripped up.

azgh