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Urdu (Hindi, Hindustani) overview | ||
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| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7257 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes  | Message 1 of 34 14 February 2005 at 2:25am | IP Logged |
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I was asked a question about studying Urdu in "General Discussion - Learning Languages Simultaneously?," which is already a rather long and rambling thread, so I thought I would answer here where such discussion properly belongs.
Urdu is the national language of Pakistan though it is only the mother tongue of some 10% of the population, and it is also one of India's 18 officially recognized languages. It is generally given something in the area of 60 million speakers, but in fact, from the point of view of communication it is really the same language as Hindi, which is between the 2nd and the 4th largest language in the world depending on whose statistics you follow. Indeed, the two languages were both known under the common name of Hindustani until about 1947. Since the partition of India and Pakistan, the two governments have been consciously trying to drive the two languages apart, in the case of Hindi by purging Arabic and Persian words and substituting Sanskrit ones for them, and in the case of Urdu by the reverse process of purging Sanskrit words and substituting Arabic and Persian words for them. A bit of history: Hindustani was originally something of a pidgin language, the effort of soldiers from various parts of India to speak Persian when that was the official court language. So, speakers naturally have a wide variety of synonyms or near synonyms at their disposal. The average speaker of either "language" still uses them all unconsciously and unselfconsciously, but government editors make the above mentioned changes before official publications are allowed. After 50 years of this, the languages are now somewhat different at higher registers, but at the spoken level of normal conversation, they are still truly identical, and if you learn "Urdu" you will be able to speak with "Hindi" speakers, who will ask you where and how you learned "Hindi," and vice versa. The only real difference between them lies in the scripts. Hindi uses the traditional Indic Devanagari script while Urdu uses a calligraphic form of the Arabic script known as "nasta'liq." In my personal experience, this script constitutes the single hardest point in learning Urdu. It is an ornate and sloping script that may indeed be beautiful at times, but is all too often blurred and smudgy and a real strain on the eyes. The other great difficulty in learning Urdu is a dearth of learning materials for it. Indeed, the only commonly available course for it is Urdu in the Teach Yourself Series, by David Matthews and Mohammed Kasim Dalvi. Thankfully it is a relatively good and thorough course. The accompanying tapes are also decent, if short (only about a total of 75 minutes of Urdu dialogues and readings). However, as I mentioned above, anyone who wants to learn Urdu can supplment this book with materials for learning Hindi, which are somewhat more numerous and more readily available. If you should persevere and want some good reading materials, Sterling Publishers in New Delhi has a series of at least five or six bilingual books of different kinds of poetic masterpieces, published on unusually high quality paper with unusually large and clear script on the left hand pages with good English translationes and transcriptions on the right. Hindi-Urdu is a language that I studied very seriously and thoroughly some years ago. I have now got it in "maintenance" mode while I concentrate on really mastering Arabic. After that, I plan to consolidate my Persian, and then I hope to really get to Hindi-Urdu. I've never yet had any contact with the real living thing, but based on my general experience and upon my degree of relative current success with living Arabic, if I were plunged into it right now, I believe I could manage to keep my head above water and start treading smoothly in short order. I only hope I can keep it that way until I finally get to give it the attention it deserves. Edited by administrator on 18 February 2005 at 12:06am 10 persons have voted this message useful | |
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7377 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 34 14 February 2005 at 3:23am | IP Logged |
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Ardaschir, this is a great post about a language unfairly not popular with Western learners. I would like to add a full profile of Hindi/Urdu for this website for prospective learners.
Although I have studied Hindi for a couple months from "Teach Yourself Hindi" before going to India a few years ago, I fail to grasp some aspects of the language. May I ask you a few questions? (1) From my recollection Hindi is an easy Indo-European language with a fascinating writing system that is not so hard to read. I seem to remember that many words have recognizable indo-european roots and thus vocabulary acquisition was not too difficult. How would you rate the difficulty of learning Hindi/Urdu? (2) Is there any advantage in studying Hindi/Urdu in its Urdu form rather than Hindi form? Is there more material for one of the two incarnations? (3) What other languages enjoy a degree of transparency relative to Hindi/Urdu? For example, does speaking Urdu make learning Farsi easier? (4) I seem to recall from my trip to India that most people you can interact it as a visitor do speak some English, which makes me wonder how useful the language is if you do not go to remote places? (5) I could not find any tapes for Hindi at the time, and had to record a native speaker in Geneva for pronunciation - not very efficient. Did you find any tapes that you can recommend? Thanks for any light you can shed! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| souley Senior Member Joined 7242 days ago 178 posts - 177 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 3 of 34 16 February 2005 at 5:21pm | IP Logged |
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Ardaschir
Thank you for this review. However, what do you suppose is the best way for me to learn to correctly read nasta'leeq? I've noticed its actually quite different from Arabic, which I can read fluently. Edited by souley on 16 February 2005 at 5:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ElComadreja Senior Member Philippines bibletranslatio Joined 7239 days ago 683 posts - 757 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Cebuano, French, Tagalog | Message 4 of 34 16 February 2005 at 9:06pm | IP Logged |
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Was Urdu the one i remeber hearing about that was easy for English speakers to speak because the sounds were the same? or was that serbo-croation? [:s] Edited by ElComadreja on 17 August 2005 at 6:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7257 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 5 of 34 17 February 2005 at 10:07pm | IP Logged |
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(1) From my recollection Hindi is an easy Indo-European language with a fascinating writing system that is not so hard to read. I seem to remember that many words have recognizable indo-european roots and thus vocabulary acquisition was not too difficult. How would you rate the difficulty of learning Hindi/Urdu?
Although Hindustani has Indo-European origins, I cannot concur that “many” words have will have recognizable roots for speakers of European languages. It is, after all, a language from an entirely different civilization with an entirely different range of cultural concepts. Beyond the terms for close family members and such things as numbers and personal pronouns, there are really not very many familiar lexical signposts, although there are now substantial numbers of English loan words one can grasp along the way. As I wrote in my earlier post, Hindi/Urdu is full of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit words, and though the latter two are also I-E, they tend to be long and convoluted and quite far from any European counterparts. There is nothing particularly difficult about acquiring Hindustani vocabulary either by internalizing dialogues or sheer memorization, but I think it would also be misleading to suggest that there is anything easy about the task simply because it is an I-E language. As far as the Devanagari writing system goes, however, you are quite right—it is both beautiful and fascinating, and moreover it is logical and phonetic and it fits the language like a glove, so learning to read it might legitimately be called an “easy” task. As far as grammar and structure are concerned, while Hindi/Urdu is substantially simplified Sanskrit, it has not come quite as far along the streamlined path as, say, English or Persian. There are a few stumbling blocks for most learners, such as a past tense in which the verb has to agree with the object, not the subject, in gender and number. Still, in terms of “objective complexity” (i.e., how many cards of the same size does it take to write all of Hindustani’s rules and regulations, declensions and conjugations, etc., compared to the number of cards it would take to do the same for other languages), Hindi/Urdu is certainly not among the world’s more convoluted languages. Phonetically, however, there is a serious difficulty, namely the “retroflex” series of consonants, made by touching the tip of your tongue to the top center of your mouth instead of your alveolar ridge in order to make sounds like d’s, t’s, and r’s. There is nothing parallel that I know of in any European language—or indeed in any other non-Indic languages. They are not only very difficult to produce, they are next to impossible to distinguish from the “normal” dental consonants of the same variety, though to the native ear they are so emphatically distinct that they go to make up many minimal pairs. Indeed, one book that I have for learning Hindi has a dialogue that pokes lighthearted fun at a learner who cannot distinguish between two different types of r’s—he says’ “mor” with one kind of r, which means “peacock,” when he should be saying “mor” with a different kind of r, which would mean what he wants to say, namely “turn.” Although the two words are repeated one after another several times in the dialogue for contrast, and although I have listened to this dialogue time and again, I cannot for the life of me tell them apart. Finally, anyone who has ever overheard Indians speaking will know that their languages have an entirely different rhythm from any European languages, a kind of rolling brook “putty-dutty-putty-dutty-putty-dutty…” that is probably extraordinarily difficulty for any adult learner to mimic accurately. All in all, I would say that Hindustani’s difficulty rating is “moderate, for an exotic language,” i.e., it is not as easy as Persian or even as easy as easy non-I-E languages like Indonesian or Turkish, but it is certainly easier than Sanskrit or Arabic, and easier by far than anything East Asian—and potential learners should always keep in mind that studying anything exotic is a very different experience from studying another European language. (2) Is there any advantage in studying Hindi/Urdu in its Urdu form rather than Hindi form? Is there more material for one of the two incarnations? Any Muslim would certainly prefer Urdu, as would anyone who simply wants to communicate with friends in an Urdu expatriate community, and anyone who has practical business or diplomatic dealings with Pakistan. Likewise, anyone who just wants to communicate with Hindu Indians could ignore Urdu altogether and just focus on Hindi. However, just as in the days when actual Hindustani teaching manuals were published giving the same exercises in both scripts, I would think that any aspiring polyglot with the slightest modicum of scholarly interest would want to learn “both” languages as the natural means of getting to know the whole thing thoroughly. As I mentioned in my first post, there is more material available for the study of Hindi, but it can be used just as well for the study of Urdu. (3) What other languages enjoy a degree of transparency relative to Hindi/Urdu? For example, does speaking Urdu make learning Farsi easier? The Indic languages of India are a perfect counterpart to the Romance languages of Europe. The role of Sanskrit is analogous to that of Latin, and her daughter languages—Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, Nepali, Oriya, Panjabi, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Gujarati, Marathi, Sinhalese, etc.—are related to each other in the same way that French, Occitan, Catalan, Castilian, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian are related to each other. India reputedly is home to close to 2000 different languages; many of those in the south (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, etc.) belong to the utterly different Dravidian family, and scattered smaller languages belong to various other families, but most if not all of the larger languages of northern India are quite closely related to Hindi/Urdu. The linguistic situation of India is indeed complicated. Hindi is the national or “link” language, but many provinces have different official “state” languages. Demographically, Hindi was probably always one of the largest languages, and a linguistic map will show its heartland to be in the very central part of northern India, so it was chosen as the link language because it has the highest transparency to the others. The speakers of a language from eastern India, such as Bengali, probably cannot understand the speakers of a language from western India, such as Gujarati, but both can probably understand a fair amount of Hindi. With my knowledge of Hindustani, when I listen to learners tapes of Panjabi I understand just about everything and feel almost as if I am listening to Hindi/Urdu; Bengali and Gujarati are a bit harder, but I feel that I can get the gist of what is going on; Nepali is more difficult, but there are still lots of familiar words; Sinhalese, isolated on Sri Lanka in the far south, is undoubtedly the most different Indic I-E language. My youthful studies of Sanskrit certainly facilitated my latter acquisition of Hindi, and learning them in reverse would also certainly be easy, since as I mentioned before, Hindi is becoming deliberately more Sanskritized with each passing year. As far as script systems are concerned, Sanskrit, Marathi, and Nepali use exactly the same script as Hindi, while Bengali, Panjabi, and Gujarati use modified forms of it, and other “Muslim” languages like Sindhi use the same script as Urdu. Since many of these names of Indic languages may be new and unfamiliar, I should mention that the ones I am citing most frequently are all giants in terms of numbers of speakers, and that they all have long and rich literary traditions. Statistics are hard to believe, particularly in a place like India, but it is probably safe to say that half a billion people speak Hindustani, and Bengali, with something in the range of 200 million speakers, is well within the top ten languages of the world, while Marathi, Gujarati, and Panjabi all have in the range of 40-80 million speakers. Finally, knowledge of Hindi/Urdu would not only facilitate the study of other Indic tongues, it would also be an enormous asset in the eventual study of both Persian and Arabic. (4) I seem to recall from my trip to India that most people you can interact it as a visitor do speak some English, which makes me wonder how useful the language is if you do not go to remote places? My answers to this are 2nd hand rather than direct, but I have heard that it is rather hopeless for a Caucasian to expect to communicate with casual acquaintances in Hindi in New Delhi. English is also one of the 18 official languages of India, and all educated Indians are fluent in it, many to the point where they speak it better than they do Hindustani or whatever their native tongue may be, though they are said to be highly appreciative for any sincere efforts to learn their languages. I imagine that reality in this respect parallels my experience of learning Korean: someone who goes to the country for the specific purpose of learning the language will probably be frustrated by the fact that he is answered so often in English, while a tourist who goes there expecting to get by on English alone will often be frustrated and perhaps frightened by the fact that he will often find himself in situations where no one can communicate with him. (5) I could not find any tapes for Hindi at the time, and had to record a native speaker in Geneva for pronunciation - not very efficient. Did you find any tapes that you can recommend? Yes, apart from the TYS Urdu that I mentioned in my first post, TYS Hindi by Rupert Snell and Simon Weightman also has a good solid hour of dialogue and readings after you edit out the English and the bells. This book was originally written in 1989 and has now been replaced by the 2000 edition, but though they have the same title and are written by the same people and published by the same press, they are NOT the same book. The 1989 edition (whose 1st chapter is “I am Ram”) is infinitely superior to the 2000 edition (whose 1st chapter is “I am Pratap”). The 2000 edition is not bad at all, it is certainly worth having, but the 1989 book is, well, infinitely more intelligent and sophisticated, and the contrast between the two is one of the main reasons I once started another thread on the declining quality of language learning materials. You might still be able to track down the older version in a used bookstore or a language laboratory. For my money, far and away the best course for learning Hindi is Assimil’s “Le hindi sans peine” (Akshay Bakaya & Annie Montant, 1994), whose tapes, after editing out the gaps, yield a solid two hours of constant target language only dialogue for shadowing. The content of Lingaphone’s “Hindi Course” is also excellent, also about two hours in duration after editing, but the production quality, both of sound and of text, is extremely disappointing for such an expensive module. I don’t know of any FSI style course for these languages, though they may be out there, but if you can handle Dutch, D.F. Plukker “Leerboek Hindi” (India Institut, Amsterdam, 1995) has several clear and crisp recorded hours of intelligent pattern sentences that accompany a most lucid and succinct presentation of the grammar. R.S. McGregor is one of THE authorities on the language and his Hindi Dictionary is the must-have lexical work for any student of the language, but his “Outline of Hindi Grammar” (Oxford, 1995) is disappointing on many levels and I never listened to the tapes that accompany the old-style disconnected and rather inane illustrative sentences. After you have a foothold in the language, the best recorded materials that I know of are the five or so hours of textual readings that accompany Sylvia Jain’s “Intermediate Hindi Reader” (Southeast Asia Institute, University of California Berkeley), though they are hard to get—you might be able to order the book from any shop around the university, but you have to go in person to the language lab itself in order to get the tapes for you have to sign a statement to the effect that you will never copy them. Despite its long literary heritage and its burgeoning computer industry, I have unfortunately never been able to locate CD-ROM’s of Indian texts for advanced study. Thank you for this review. However, what do you suppose is the best way for me to learn to correctly read nasta'leeq? I've noticed its actually quite different from Arabic, which I can read fluently. I would certainly suggest working with the TYS Urdu course. The first thing to do is to become fully familiar with the new and different letters, of which there is a good solid handful or two, for sounds that do not exist in Arabic. Then, photocopy all the textual material, magnifying it as large as you can as you do so. Then, repeatedly shadow the tape while simultaneously reading the text. Eventually you will be able to read it out loud even without the tapes, and thus you will begin to become familiar with the forms of the words. You can also do the same thing with that poetic series that I mentioned: read a line aloud from the transcription, and then, with it still echoing in your ears, read it aloud again while looking at the original text. 10 persons have voted this message useful | |
| nsakic Newbie Canada Joined 7218 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes | Message 6 of 34 20 February 2005 at 7:47am | IP Logged |
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Isn't 'Urdu' itself a Turkish word meaning 'Caravan'? How many times have I heard people saying, 'Farsi is the mother of Urdu'. If I remember correctly, people who get bachelors or masters degree in Urdu must also be fluent in Farsi, because so much of poetry and vocabulary is given to Urdu from Farsi.
-Nikolas 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7257 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 7 of 34 21 February 2005 at 9:01am | IP Logged |
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Yes, "Urdu" is itself a Turkish word meaning camp or court and referring to the military camp or court of the Muslim rulers of Delhi. Urdu is also the shortened named of the longer Persian term, "zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mualla," which means "the language of the exalted camp/court." At that time, Persian was indeed the court language of the rulers, and Urdu grew out of the synthesis of this with the local Indic language(s). I knew that Urdu's debt to Persian was very great, but I never before heard the phrase you quoted, nor that students of Urdu were required to master Persian as well.
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| randy310 Senior Member United States Joined 7066 days ago 117 posts - 117 votes Speaks: English* | Message 8 of 34 17 August 2005 at 1:20am | IP Logged |
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Probably the most comprehensive courses for Urdu and Hindi are offered by Audio Forum. The Urdu course includes 10 hours audio and 1000 pages of text and the Hindi course includes 12 hours audio.
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