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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Hindi / Urdu And other IE Indian Languages
In-Reply-To: Misha Chaitanya Chitharanjan's message of 22 Jan 1997 05:34:12 GMT
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Date: Wed, 22 Jan 1997 23:49:05 GMT
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Spoken Hindi and Urdu are very nearly identical; in the more formal styles of
the written languages, the vocabulary effects Mr. Chitharanjan noted do exist.
(This leaves aside the fact that Hindi is written with Devanagari characters,
Urdu with Persian.)

The criterion of "mutual intelligibility" of languages is misleading.  I have
observed extended conversations among Poles, a Ukrainian, and several Bosnians,
each speaking his or her own language, in which most of the information to be
exchanged was indeed understood.  So a Hindi speaker understanding a little bit
of Punjabi, or a Spaniard understanding some Italian, does not mean that the
two languages are "more of a distant dialect than another language."
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
