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Make it Clear: Mutual Intelligibility of Urdu with Hindi, but not Urdu with Arabic and Persian/Farsi

Dear all and To editor Fowler&fowler:,

Urdu being a form of standard register of Hindustani, is mutually intelligible with Hindi as they share the grammar, construction, conjunctions ... and even the accent, they are linguistically same language even though "the large religious and political differences make much of the little linguistic differences (between Urdu and Hindi)", see reference [1]

An Introduction to Sociolinguistics By Ronald Wardhaugh, Janet M. Fuller, Wiley & Sons. 2015. pp30]. Hindi and Urdu are not mutually intelligible with Arabic or Persian. Even Hindi has loan words from English and writing Hindi in Latin script does not make it mutually intelligible with Latin, English or French. None of these four are mutually intelligible, all are from Indo-European family and last three use Latin script. Even Hindi is not mutually intelligible with Sanskrit from which it draws heavily and shares the Devnagri script with. In fact variations of Arabic, though they sue same nastaliq script, are not mutually intelligible with each other, let alone being mutually intelligible with Urdu. See this reference [2] The article mentions that Urdu draws from Hindi, Arabic and Persian. Article also makes it clear that Hindi and Urdu are mutually intelligible, this needs to be made clear that urdu is not mutual intelligibility with Arabic and Persian.

It will also be useful to include the reason why Urdu is mutually intelligible with Hindi and not with Arabic and Persian. "two closely related and by and large mutually intelligible speech varieties may be considered separate languages if they are subject to separate institutionalisation contexts, e.g. official speech forms of different states and state institutions, or of different religious ethinic communities. Examples of such language paris are Norwegian and Swedish, Hindi and Urdu", see reference [3] The same source further clarifies that, "on the other hand, speech varieties that differ considerably in structure and are not always mutually intelligible, such as Moroccan Arabic, Yemeni Arabic and Lebanese Arabic."[3] Those who want to understand the concept of mutual intelligibility in more detail please refer to this source, last para on page to page 8 and separate language versus dialect and this.

I suggest the following: 1. include the statement upfront (the current unofficial "exec summary" type section on top) that while Urdu is mutually intelligible with Hindi but not with other. 2. include a subheading in the article to discuss the mutual intelligibility of urdu with languages it borrows from. The central logic being that the "base" of Urdu is Khadiboli (Hindustani), and there are other toppings added to it including Hindi, Arabic, Persian and Chagatai, etc. Among those it is MI with Hindustani and not with the rest for the reasons mentioned above. The concept of Hindi and Urdu being two language could politically motivated but their mutual intelligibility is not subject to the political consideration but to linguistic considerations.

Discuss it here please.

Thanks Being.human (talk)

References

  1. ^ Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India. Bernard Bate. Columbia University Press.2010.pp.14 isbn=0231519400
  2. ^ Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India. Bernard Bate. Columbia University Press. Pp.14
  3. ^ a b Romani in Britain: The Afterlife of a Language: The Afterlife of a Language. Yaron Matras. Edinburgh University Press. 2010.Pp.5

On the need for citations (or not)

We read:

Because of the difficulty in distinguishing between Urdu and Hindi speakers in India and Pakistan, as well as estimating the number of people for whom Urdu is a second language, the estimated number of speakers is uncertain and controversial.[citation needed]

The "citation needed" flag was added in this edit by one among several usernames of this person.

So, the claims are:

  1. It's difficult to "[distinguish] between Urdu and Hindi speakers in India and Pakistan"
  2. It's difficult to "[estimate] the number of people for whom Urdu is a second language"
  3. "the estimated number of speakers [of Urdu] is uncertain and controversial"
  4. Numbers 1 and 2 above are causes of number 3.

Do we really need reliable sources for any of these? Is it disputed by anyone who's dispassionate and at least moderately informed?

(I write not as an aggrieved/lazy contributor. I don't recall ever contributing to this article. And I'm happy to add "citation needed" flags elsewhere.) -- Hoary (talk) 00:05, 22 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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Clean-up

I am going to clean up this page a bit because I find too ideological and political rather than informative. If I make any mistakes, please give me a shout. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 23:03, 15 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  • An example of what I call a "political" statement is this in the lead: Urdu is mutually intelligible with Standard Hindi. A lay reader is going to wonder, if they are the same language why wouldn't they be "mutually intelligible"? The cited source says:

Finally, the concept of diglossia, especially when compared with bilingualism, as Fishman does, hides the fact that what constitutes a "language" is not only an empirical but also a phenomenological problem.... two named "languages"—say, Hindi and Urdu—may be mutually intelligible in the oral/aural channel—indeed the same language for the vast majority of speakers—but be written in two different scripts, have different literary traditions, and—critically—be the official languages of two different (and often antagonistic) nation-states, India and Pakistan.

So, if we want to say that they are "mutually intelligible", for whatever reason, we also need to emphasise, again, that they are the same language. Dear reader, we are not trying to make a fool out of you! -- Kautilya3 (talk) 11:09, 16 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Can this source be used for number of native speakers in Pakistan?

https://books.google.com.pk/books?redir_esc=y&id=2RdITXUpyVgC&q=22+million#v=snippet&q=22%20million&f=false

This source says 22 million Urdu speakers. But this addition was reverted here... [1]

45.116.232.53 (talk) 05:28, 28 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The source itself is good. But note that Rafiq Zakaria is discussing partition migration figures, for which nobody has any authoritative data. I would think Pakistan Bureau of Statistics is giving authoritative data, and we can't contradict it based on some other source. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 09:23, 28 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Absurd etymology taking loanwords

Horde is a loanword, so it's really a bad example. Reading the article, we think that it has the same Indo-European root in Urdu and in English. That's totally wrong and absurd. Some words exist with the same roots in Romance or Germanic languages and in Urdu, but for a loanword, it's cheating. It's like saying a loanword in Urdu, taken from the English language, has the same root. It's absurd.

It has been taken in English from French, "horde" is the French form (the "h" and the final "e" are typical in French), and in French, it has been taken from Tartar "orda", and Turkish and Mongol "ordu".

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