Sunday, November 02, 2008

English in Hindi and vice versa...

Well, as the riches of India (when it was not poor, that is) went into the pockets of East India company's entrepreneurial officers, a lot of native words slipped into the language of the rulers as well. They were so many that some people took the effort to compile a dictionary out of it (reportedly with ~2000 words) and called it Hobson-Jobson (an English word now, that derives from hai hussain!hai hussain- sort of a crying that shia muslims in the subcontinent performed during Muharram). This dictionary dates back somewhere in 19th century, during when india was still pretty much a discovery for Europe.

Of course, hindustani wasn't the only contributor with words like Hopper (appam) and pariah (from Tamil) getting into the Brit. English.

Feel free to browse the dictionary:

http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/hobsonjobson/

As for the English-isms of Hindi, a plenty of words have same roots despite the two languages not having exchanged directly. Take an example of the words bind / bandhan, sharkara-shakkar/sugar or sarp/serpent. The words have same IE roots. Apart from those, some words from Urdu might bear semitic roots that eventually show up in English (other than "imports" like coffee, jasmine, syrup[shorba]).

All that said, here is something I want to say about the non-Englishness of Hindi. Urdu/Hindi speakers are somewhat less friendly to Anglicizaton but that is really not be the reason why they still continue to use words like 'Ruus' (Russia), BartanI (Britain), Yunan (greece) or turq (Turkey) whether in common parlance or in writing.

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