interesting experience

[Robert Zydenbos]

Skipping over the expected communalisation / politicisation, returning to
Stephen Brown's original question and adding my two cents in an attempt at
further clarification:

> His response was immediatly shocking to me.  He
> told me at great length how though most people believe they are speaking
> hindi, they are actually speaking Urduu.

There is nothing shocking about it, since modern standard Hindi has Urdu
as its base (some of the most everyday words, even in highly Sanskritised
Hindi, are Persian or Arabic) and speakers apparently can rather freely choose
to what extent they Sanskritise or Persianise their vocabulary. There is no
strictly fixed dividing line between Hindi and Urdu. One 'Hindi' literary
journal of the Sahitya Akademi in Delhi prints Hindi translations of stories
and poems from other Indian languages, but of Urdu stories and poems no
'anuvaada', but a 'lipyantara' (change of script) is given. This should give you
an idea of how little difference there is between the two 'languages'. At
least one linguistic historian has compared Hindi to Esperanto, which I think
is going a bit too far; however, Hindi is not an entirely natural language,
but a to some extent forcibly Sanskritised version of Urdu. To what extent
there is any merit in this is a different matter, but it does explain the
peculiar relationship between Hindi and Urdu.

> is there any value to this
> claim? Also, is this a reletively common claim?

The claim is not at all common (for reasons as you can deduce from some of
the messages on this list), but there certainly is value to it. E.g., one
major means of popularising 'Hindi' is popular 'Bollywood' 'Hindi' cinema:
the naac-gaan movies. But if you try to translate the dialogues and songs, you
will discover that concise Hindi dictionaries fall short of giving you the
meanings of numerous words - which you will find in concise Urdu
dictionaries. Which raises the question (which is rhetorical: I don't want to read any
answers): what is the real language of Hindi movies?

--
Prof. Dr. Robert J. Zydenbos
Institut fuer Indologie und Iranistik
Universitaet M�nchen
E-mail zydenbos at gmx.de

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