Our Perso-Arabic Roots--Part I

Part of the beauty of a language is its background, and Urdu/Hindi is no exception to this. Like English, which has gathered a worldwide vocabulary like a magnet, Urdu/Hindi is rich in word choice and composition, deriving words from various sources. Other than the influences of Sanskrit and, today, English, a vast multitude of words comes from the past influences of Arabic and Persian (Farsi), words we use every day, regardless of religion or status.
What I have often been fascinated by is the extent to which Arabic and Persian words have permeated these "sister languages" over the years, to the point where nearly half of the words in my Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary are of Perso-Arab origin. Words like haal and musaafir and khairat and ta'aluqaat (all Arabic loanwords) along with sakht and gulaab and baagh and khushbu (all Persian loanwords) are thrown around in daily conversations, mixing in with our local flares of speech, giving our Urdu/Hindi a masala-like consistency: everything jumbled around like a bunch of spices thrown into a bowl. And when we add English words, we can absorb it with our chalta-hai (anything goes) attitude, getting our points across on the pragmatic stilts of language.

Nowhere was the influence of Arabic on Urdu/Hindi more evident to me than when I was taking first-level and second-level Arabic this past year. My teacher was always giving us more vocabulary words, and when she wrote them down in Arabic script on the whiteboard, I noticed words that I knew, most of which had the same meaning in Urdu as they had in Arabic. Fursah meant fursat, muHaafiD meant the same as muhaafiz, hawaa meant the same as hawaa (She told me, towards the end of the last class, that I was exactly like an Italian trying to learn French). I would also write down Urdu words in nastaliq on paper and ask my teacher if she recognized them as Arabic (which she did, about 90% of the time), and of course, when we went together to a masjid, the Islamic terms I'd heard from Pakistani Muslim friends were exactly the same, pronounced a little bit differently ( In Urdu we pronounce the Arabic letters  D, DH, and z  all as "z", whereas they have their own sounds in Arabic). When I played tabla at school for an event earlier this year one of the Saudi students asked the name of my instrument and smiled when he heard it was called "tabla": This is too an Arabic word, Tabla, which means, of course, drum.

As for Persian influences, what can we say? Last week, watching the Persian film Leila, I was stunned to see hear how many words I knew from Urdu reflected in the Farsi I heard onscreen. Words like mamnun and gol and khastegar and shabaash reverberated in my ears, their meanings already garnered from the Urdu vocabulary I'd gotten earlier. The Persians gave us the charbaagh design, the measurement system of nastaliq script (which you can see in the Taj Mahal, where the Islamic calligraphy on the walls is measured so that when you look at it from below it does not look distorted from  the effects of perspective), great poetry (Saadi's Golestan and our Persian-influenced Ghalib), and so much more that this post is titled "Part I". What do we say to our Persian forefathers? "Mamnun (Thank you)".