On the history of the Urdu language

What is Urdu.

Urdu is popularly regarded to be an offspring of Persian, having been ushered into existence in the camps of the Moslem invaders and the capitals of Moslem Sovereigns in India. People are misled as to its origin, by the preponderance of Persianized words, the prosody of its poetry, and its script. It is fre­quently referred to as the language of the Mohammedans as op­posed to Hindi which is claimed to be the language of the Hindus. An acute controversy has been raging between the protagonists of Urdu and the champions of Hindi over the merits and superiority of one over the other. In the heat of discussion people have forgot­ten the origin of Urdu. Urdu, by origin, is a dialect of Western Hindi spoken for centuries in the neighbourhood of Delhi and Meerut and is directly descended from Sour Semic Prakrit. This living dialect has formed the basis of Urdu, the name having been given at a later period. It retains its original and essential cha­racter in the grammar, idioms and a large number of Hindi words. They clearly point to its Indian parentage. It was an accident that this dialect became the lingua franca of India, for it so happened that Delhi, where this dialect was spoken, became the camping ground and capital of the Mohammedan invaders and sovereigns. It is therefore clearly wrong to say, as is stated by Mir Aman and early Urdu and foreign writers, that Urdu is a 'mongrel pigeon form of speech, made up of contributions from the various lan­guages which met in Delhi Bazaar'. It is true that the camp was an important factor in the life of this dialect and influenced it so largely as to give it its own name. This dialect was in a state of flux and readily assimilated new words and phrases and still shows considerable capacity to absorb words from other sources. The English nomenclature "Hindustani" for Urdu though an improvement over it is misleading, for Hindustani properly comprises dialects prevalent in Hindustani, e.g., Eastern Hindi, Western Hindi and Rajasthani. It is also slightly incorrect to say that Urdu is derived directly from Brij Bhasha, another dialect of Western Hindi as is maintained by Muhammad Husain Azad_r for Brij Bhasha though closely akin to and having many simila­rities with the dialect spoken in the neighbourhood of Delhi, is another dialect spoken in Muttra and surrounding districts. It is its sister dialect that is responsible for the birth of Urdu.

Relation of Urdu to Hindi. As is mentioned above, Urdu owes its existence to the dialect prevalent near Delhi and Meerut, an offshoot of Western Hindi.

Hindi and Urdu are of the same parentage and in their natu­re they are not different from each other. But each has taken a different line of development. Urdu, under the tutelage of the Mussulmans, has sought its inspiration from Persian while Hindi has reverted to its original fount — Sanskrit.

Debt of Urdu language and literature to Persian.. In the be­ginning the language was quite simple and homely and sufficed for the few wants of the peasants whose needs were few and whose outlook on life was circumscribed. As it began to develop into a literary language, its vocabulary was enriched with various words from Persian and through Persian from Arabic and Tur­kish. Writers began to draw upon the resonant Persian to secure variety. Persian constructions foreign to the indigenous dialect began to be imported into and engrafted upon the language. The Persian script was borrowed with some modifications as Persian words could only be written with ease and fluency in it. Urdu poetry modeled itself upon Persian poetry and annexed not only metres but themes, imagery, allusions and peculiar phrases and constructions.

Modern Arabic

The intrusion of Europe into the range of vision of the Arab world begins with Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1798. The adoption of innumerable elements of Western civilization had far-reaching effects on the written language. This began already with Muhammad Ali's programme of reform which set out deli­berately to take over Western achievements and was focused on France. As a result of the sending of student missions to study in France, the foundation of schools on European lines and the foundation of an Arabic press, and, above all, of the translation of numerous European books, the necessity of finding expressions for a host of foreign ideas was felt first in Egypt and then too in other countries — foreign ideas for which at first only foreign words were available.

A real counter-movement against the excessive use of foreign words did not begin until the second half of the XIX century. The question of how to meet the ever-growing need for new expressions in Arabic became one of the major problems of intellectual life. The impact of Europe in itself awoke among the Arabs, after an interval of centuries, reconsideration of their own linguistic and literary tradition. The revival of the old philologi­cal learning was facilitated by the printing of many old literary works and especially of native dictionaries and grammars. The old purism was revived again, and with it the tendency artificial­ly to control the development of the language, with recourse whe­rever possible to the old model language. The inevitable moder­nization and expansion of the vocabulary of modern Arabic ought, according to the wishes of the purists, to be carried out by drawing to the greatest possible extent on the wealth of words, roots and forms in modern Arabic. After several unsuccess­ful attempts, a scientific academy was founded in Damascus in 1919, which devoted itself to the reform of the language and published many contributions to the language problem in its re­view, which first appeared in 1921. In 1932 the Egyptian Royal Academy of the Arabic Language came into existence. Apart from the study of the old language and literature its main concern is the regulation and expansion of the modern vocabulary. Although the possibility of popularizing newly-coined technical terms in specialist circles has often been overestimated, the practical effect of the purist movement on actual language usage cannot be denied.

Turning to the linguistic facts, the striking feature is the infiltration of English and French phraseology, translated into Arabic (so-called loan translation or "calques") and the change in the inner form. In particular the language of daily communica­tion (press and radio) and of writers with little or no classical education has a distinct European touch. Phraseology and style are far more difficult to check than terminology. This develop­ment is therefore inevitable and must be accepted as a fact. In the field of belles-lettres, on the other hand, we find in many ca­ses a strong attachment to tradition. Authors with a classical education are still able today to keep close to the ideal of ol­den Arabic in their style; they sometimes make use of uncommon words and phrases of the old literature and especially of the Ko­ran as artistic and stylistic devices. But no one can completely escape the influence of European phraseology.

Grammar, on the other hand, which can be defined in rules and which is much more subject to conscious control, gives quite a different picture. The written language has remained untouched by the sound-change, and the morphology has remained constant from the earliest times till the present day; the same is true of the syntax at least in its basic features.

In vocabulary a considerable basic stock has remained alive sinсе the earliest times. Post-classical words, including those from the later Middle Ages, form a further element of the modern vocabulary. A host of generally accepted expressions are available to express ideas which come from Europe. Forgotten words of olden Arabic have been revived and are used without formal alteration but with meanings more or less modified. Until the First World War the majority of foreign words were borrowed from French, others from Italian. English became an influence after the First World War, especially in Egypt and Iraq.

Languages of Ethiopia

A glance at any linguistic map of Ethiopia will show the small yet compact Semitic island stretching from northern Erit­rea to Addis Abeba in the south. There are, perhaps, seven million Semitic speaking Ethiopians and nearly as many who speak lan­guages of the Cushitic and Neolithic groups. The Semitic langua­ges of Ethiopia represent next to Arabic, the living Semitic ton­gues spoken by the largest number of people; Amharic is well in the lead, followed by Tigrinia.

In the many classification schemes that have been proposed for the Semitic languages the position of Ethiopic has always been: a South Semitic language which is to be grouped with South Arabic. The linguistic significance of the Ethiopian languages lies not only in their geographical position as a bridge between Asia and Africa and their proximity to the area, i. e. South Arabia, which is frequently considered to have been the original habitat of the Semites, but especially in their close contacts with the Hamitic tongues. In Ethiopia we find the most favourable condi­tions for observing the interaction of Semitic and Cushitic and thus for revealing the original unity of the Hamito-Semitic lan­guages.

Considering the comparatively small distinctions between the various dialects of epigraphic South Arabic, we are unlikely to find any indications of those rather minute differences in the fully developed Ge'ez language. Nor does there appear to be any need to make Amharic claim descent from an unknown "sister" tongue of Ge'ez. The evolution of Amharic and the other modern languages can be best envisaged in this way: classical Ethiopic, in the course of time, spread over a fairly large area and, when political and other circumstances were propitious, eventually be­came differentiated to such an extent that the varying speech forms were mutually unintelligible.

It is obviously quite impossible to be precise about the time when Ge'ez had ceased to be South Arabic and had become a different language no longer intelligible to traders from the east coast of the Red Sea. The process was, of course, slow and gra­dual, but the distinctive identity of Ge'ez must have been establi­shed by the beginning of the first century A.D. The South Ara­bic inscriptions in Ethiopia were followed a few centuries la­ter by Ethiopic epigraphic documents in which Ge'ez makes its first appearance as a new language — quite distinct from South Arabic. We possess no Ethiopic literature from that period, and, as far as we can judge at present, the life of Ge'ez as a spoken language seems to have been relatively short. So, of course, was the full bloom of the Aksumite Kingdom. Its decline began in the seventh or eighth century and followed, some 200 years or so la­ter, by the eclipse of Ge'ez as a living tongue, though it conti­nued to be Ethiopia's literary and ecclesiastical language to al­most the present day. It is, however, interesting to note that the classical period of Ge'ez literature was between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, i. e. hundreds of years after it had ceased to be a living language used in the day-to-day life of the people.

Through the influence of the Church and its wide ramifica­tions Ge'ez was embalmed and kept in a permanently "frozen" state throughout the centuries. From the beginning of the second millennium Ge'ez has occupied a position in Ethiopia which is similar to that of Latin in the European setting up to the seven­teenth or eighteenth century. All written work was limited to those, who were capable of manipulating the only worthy medium of literary expression.

The literary exclusiveness of Ge'ez had suppressed almost all information regarding the vernaculars. Fortunately, the ban was applied a trifle more leniently in the south, outside the area of the original Aksumite dominion, where Amharic is spoken. Thus we do possess some old Amharic Imperial songs dating back to the fourteenth century. Later on, in the sixteenth and se­venteenth centuries, the Jesuits employed Amharic for their pro­paganda and translated into the vernacular such of their writings as might sway the people. For this purpose they obviously con­sidered Ge'ez wholly unsuitable. But with the expulsion of the Jesuits the impetus given to the use of Amharic in writing had been spent and Ge'ez regained its literary supremacy — until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Amharic publications be­gan to appear.

Amharic has long been called Lesana Negus, "the language of the king", for, though it has only recently become the official lan­guage of the Ethiopian Empire, it has for centuries been the lan­guage of the Court and the great majority of the population of central tableland. Nowadays Amharic is spoken not only in its home province, but it covers most of the area south of the Tigre to the edge of the rift valley. Yet even today there is no complete linguistic homogeneity in this region, and one will encounter several Cushitic languages within it of which Galla is the most important. The number of Amharic speakers ranges between 3 and 5 millions. There is little doubt that Amharic is slowly gain­ing ground, and the stationing of Amharic speaking administra­tions throughout the country will in time give it the status of a lingua franca in most parts of the Empire.

ACTIVE VOCABULARY

accent (n, v); (be) accessible through (other tongues); give access to; agglutinate; agglutination; agglutinative language; analytic; analytic language; archaic; archaism; auxiliary; auxiliary word; auxiliary verb; bilingual; bilinguism; borrow (v); borrowing (n); borrowed word; case; case-ending; character; (be) current; colloquial; colloquialism; colloquial language; conjugate; conjugation; corrupt (v); corrupt (adj); corruption; declension; derive (from); derivative; derivation; dialect; dialectal; flexion; flexional language; hieroglyph; hieroglyphic script; inflect; inflection (inflexion); inflecting language; inflected words; intonation; isolate; isolation; isolating (language); invariable; language (tongue); state (official) / popular / literary / vernacular / written / spoken / native / mother / foreign (language); linguist; linguistic; linguistics; linguistic minority; loan-word; morphology; morphological; parts of speech: adjective, adverb, article, noun, numeral, pronoun, verb, inter­jection, preposition, conjunction; phonetic; phonetics; prefix (n, v); root (stem); sentence; parts of sentence: subject, predicate, object (direct, indirect), attribute, adverbial modi­fier; regionalect; stress; suffix; syllable; syllabic; monosyllabic; polysyllabic, dissyllabic; polysynthetic languages; syntax; syntactic; syntactical; tone; tone language; vocabulary; (rigid) word order.