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Comment by owaislone | Hacker News Reader

They are almost identical. Standard Urdu taught in schools might be a bit hard to follow for Hindi speakers and vice-versa but on the street level, it really is almost exactly the same. As a native Urdu speaker, when I went to college in western India, people would often ask me if I knew Urdu and wanted to hear what it sounded like. They were always surprised when I revealed that I was speaking it all along as they assumed I was speaking Hindi which was technically correct as they really are the same language with different script and a bit of unique vocabulary. The day to day language that people of the region call Hindi or Urdu, and what you'll hear in all of the Bollywood movies is actually a mix of both. Many experts call the language Hindustani and consider Urdu and Hindi two dialects of it.

A video from one of my favourite Youtube channels explains it in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxSd7p1i_TA

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I've noticed that some words have different pronunciations. For instance, the word for "definitely" is pronounced zaroor in Urdu but in Hindi, it's pronounced jaroor.

Very true, in most Hindi speaking states people have a hard time pronouncing Z and often pronounce it as J even quite often even in English. Same thing with SH vs S.

That said, I've personally seen this as a common occurrence among people who didn't study any other languages other than Hindi or didn't study any at all.

I struggle with this sort of thing a lot, as I'm learning Hindi as a native English speaker. So I suppose I should learn it as za, (sabzi is an example that comes to mind), but just understand that if I hear someone else say it it may be ja? Everyone's going to understand za, even if it's not how they personally say it right?

Yes, pretty sure everyone will understand you perfectly irrespective of whether you say sabzi or sabji.

This isn't really a difference in pronunciation between Hindu and Urdu as much as it is a sound change that has occurred in some dialects of the Hindustani language. Both Hindi and Urdu have the consonant /z/. However in parts of India this consonant has shifted from /z/ to /dʒ/. It is considered colloquial or uneducated.

TIL that it's supposed to start with a "z" sound…I've always heard it be pronounced with a "j".

Jaroor/zaroor is Urdu word. Hindi is निश्चित (nishchit).

Just because zaroor is commonly used doesn't make it Hindi.

Noone uses the so called text book Hindi on the street. Text book Hindi was introduced as a way to eliminate Persian words from Hindi about 100 years ago. So far text book Hindi has stayed strictly inside text books and dramas. Zaroor is indeed a Hindi word of Persian origin. Just like zeher, as opposed to Vish - which can only be found in text books.

What's your point? I already said in a separate comment that there is colloquial Hindi, which like many other languages has words from other languages, especially from Urdu. But that does not make those words Hindi. They remain Urdu words.

We similarly use several words from Latin, French and other languages in colloquial English, but from pure language standpoint I doubt that they'd be called English words.

Edit: A Wikipedia page of interest [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi–Urdu_controversy

Would you consider 'similar', 'several', 'language', 'colloquial', or 'doubt' to be English words?

All of them are of foreign origin.

I'm not qualified to answer that.

Me personally, yes I would. A linguist, I can't say, would perhaps depend on each word and when they became part of the language.

Hindi is obviously derived from Sanskrit and other languages. However, Hindi and Urdu are quiet different. Give a word and in most cases most people will be able to tell if it's a Hindi word or an Urdu word.

Clearly you are not qualified to answer the questions, but you keep on answering.

Linguistically there is no difference between Hindi and Urdu. The primary criterion is grammatical structure which is identical in Hindi and Urdu. Writing systems and choice of nouns don't matter either.

Hindi is not obviously derived from Sanskrit. Can a Hindi speaker follow Sanskrit easily or is Punjabi easier? Urdu/Hindi are indirectly derived from Sanskrit and both of them have the same connection to Sanskrit.

The so called pure Hindi/Urdu is a language noone speaks. The artificial text book Hindi which noone speaks was constructed 100 years ago by replacing Persian loanwords with Sanskrit words and writing suitable Sanskrit based dictionaries.

If you are certain that pure Hindi is a thing, please tell us what percentage of Hindi speaking population uses nischit in place of zaroor and why is this minority Hindi pure.

As a side note, language relationships are not dictated by loan words. Otherwise south Indian languages would be considered indo-aryan rather than dravidian. In fact, some south Indian languages use more Sanskrit based words than Hindi.

The only difference between hindi and Urdu is political.

Appendix: list of loanwords from Persian in Hindi, for which nobody uses Sanskrit based equivalents in real life.

Saaya, hamesha, pareshaan, Khushi, sabzi, mehrban, deewar, taaza, darwaaza.

Maybe there is some dude somewhere who uses pratidin instead of Roz - I have never met this mythical creature. Just like using a word like "light* in a Hindi sentence doesn't change the language, neither does using Persian loanwords.

Over and out.

Crossing into personal attack will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone is. Doubly so when the topic is divisive, for example as nationalistic topics are.

Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit the incivilities out of your comments here in the future? We'd appreciate it.

Crossing into personal attack will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone is. Doubly so when the topic is divisive, for example as nationalistic topics are.

Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit the incivilities out of your comments here in the future? We'd appreciate it.

Would you say सफ़ेद, गरम, अख़बार, वक़्त, मुज्ररिम, इलज़ाम, ख़त, etc are not Hindi words? Would you rather say श्वेत, ऊष्म, समाचारपत्र, मुजरिम, आरोप, पत्र? Most people use them interchangeably.

Most people just use words in the former category. A lot of people wouldn't even recognise some of the words in the latter category if they heard them being spoken, as opposed to seeing them in writing.

Yes, they are Urdu words, not Hindi. Yes, they are more commonly used than the Hindi words you mentioned.

For what it's worth, मुजरिम is also Urdu. Not sure about आरोप, but I have a feeling that it's also Urdu, though I could be wrong.

Edit: read any Hindi newspaper these days, at least the online edition, and in fact you will find a lot of common Hindi/Urdu words being replaced with English words written in Devnagri.

What you have been basically arguing is that Urdu is India's most widely spoken language and Hindi is a niche minority language, definitely outside the top 20.

It's not clear to me how that conclusion can be drawn simply my looking at a very small set of words, while completely ignoring all else that makes a language.

Moreover, there are hundreds of dialects of Hindi spoken in India, each with its own nuances and varying degrees of Urdu words.

In addition, there is no denying that Urdu and Hindi have some shared lineage.

Again will refer to the Wikipedia [0] for better coverage of this topic

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi–Urdu_controversy

> while completely ignoring all else that makes a language.

What else makes a language? Syntax? Hindi and Urdu have almost identical syntax. There are more syntactical differences between Hindi and Punjabi than there are between Hindi and Urdu.

The Wikipedia article does not support your argument. It merely relates the history of the bifurcation primary driven by differences in script and religion. I am well versed with the history of Hindi and Urdu going beyond this Wikipedia article.

If you want to make your argument rigorous please give an estimate of pure textbook Hindi speakers (people who use avashya instead of zaroor, hriday instead of Dil outside academics and newspapers) and "hindustani" speakers.

My conservative estimate is less than 10M for "pure Hindi" and greater than 300M for regular hindi/Urdu.

This is because virtually every one from North India and Pakistan speaks the so called Hindi/Urdu mixed language. I have also met bhojpuri, awadhi, marwari speakers but I am yet to meet the mythical pure Hindi speaker and I am a really old guy.

Again, Hindi and Urdu are not 2 languages with shared lineage. They were one and the same language until about 1850 until Britains choice of using the Arabic script for administering India angered the Hindus.

Yes there were cultural/academic differences and many different dialects of Hindi. Kabir sounds very different from Ghalib. But for the man on the street there was no difference. At most, you can argue that Urdu is the most popular dialect of Hindi. It wouldn't be correct, but less wrong.

Hyderabadi and Tamil Muslims speak a dialect of Hindi that they call urdu that would make Ghalib spin in his grave.

Differences within Urdu/Hindi are far more tremendous than the Hindi Urdu split. Calling them separate languages is crazy.

It's a cultural standard. Muslims call their language Urdu. Hindus call it Hindi. The language is the same, whatever you call it.

Is चाभी a Hindi word?

Hindi and Urdu both.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%9A%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%AD%E...

Sorry, it was supposed to be rhetorical. It's a borrowing from Portuguese, so by the standards yumraj seems to be employing it shouldn't count as Hindi.

Likewise, निश्चित certainly isn't Hindi in this narrow sense. It's a direct borrowing from Sanskrit, not a native, inherited word of the language.

And Hindi (हिन्दी) itself isn't a Hindi word; it's Persian (likewise Hindu).

Sorry, I didn't realise it was rhetorical.

If we discount direct borrowings from Sanskrit, I guess there would be very little left. Something like Pali, essentially.

No, the core of Hindi is inherited, ultimately from something like 'vulgar Sanskrit', not borrowed from Sanskrit. So like the core of Italian vocabulary is inherited from (vulgar) Latin, though there are of course also direct borrowings (at later dates) from Latin into Italian.

So 'fire' in Hindi(/Urdu) is āg (आग), but 'fire' in Sanskrit is agni (अग्नि), which has also been borrowed into Hindi (as the name of the god of fire; or fire in ritual contexts). Now, āg descends from agni, but represents the natural linguistic development into Hindi.

That's why I said Pali, or something like Pali. Pali words seem like they are vulgarised Sanskrit words.

Fire in Pali is 'aggi'. Seems a plausible link between 'agni' and 'aag'.

Well, Pali is a sort of standardised form of Middle Indo-Aryan, so, yes.

But you suggested there would be very little left. Yet the core of both Hindi & Urdu is (unsurprisingly) inherited from Vulgar Sanskrit>(some sort of) Prakrit>Apabhramśa>... , so it's rather a lot of vocabulary that's there.

You’re right, my sloppy remark was incorrect. Is there any reading you can recommend in this area, anything that may come to mind easily?

For the more modern vocabulary issues (borrowings from Persian, Perso-Arabic, English, Portuguese etc.) in Hindi/Urdu, I would recommend the introduction to

(1) Christopher Shackle & Rupert Snell. 1990. Hindi and Urdu since 1800: a common reader. New Delhi: Heritage Publishers.

[which is actually now freely available online at https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/46072 (had I known, I would have linked it earlier/higher in the thread, since it's very relevant) its bibliography is also good for further reading]

For the earlier development of modern Indo-Aryan languages from Sanskrit:

(2) Jules Bloch (ed. & translated by A. Master). 1965. Indo-Aryan from the Vedas to modern times. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve.

For a good general overall (including history and other things) to Indo-Aryan languages:

(3) Colin P. Masica. 1991. The Indo-Aryan languages. Cambridge: CUP.

In Hindi (modelled on S.K. Chatterjee's The Origin & Development of the Bengali language [written in English!]):

(4) Tiwari, U.N. 1961. हिंदी भाषा का उद्गम और विकास [hindī bhāṣā kā udgam aur vikās]. Prayag, Allahabad: Bharati Bhandar.

Another great (free, online) reference is the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia (including non-Indo-Aryan languages of India as well) at: https://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/ (perhaps esp. including Turner's A comprehensive dictionary of Indo-Aryan languages: https://dsalsrv04.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/soas/ ).

[Some of the other references can be found 'freely' online in pdf form in the usual 'dark' corners.]

Wow, wow. This information is greatly appreciated, many thanks.

> Just because zaroor is commonly used doesn't make it Hindi.

By this reasoning Urdu is the most widely spoken language of India.

'Nishchit' doesn't even by itself replace 'zaroor'. 'Nishchit' means certain or definite. To replace 'zaroor' (certainly or definitely) you would actually have to say 'nishchit roop se'.

Hindi-speaking people absolutely use 'zaroor' and 'bilkul' instead of 'nishchit roop se' when they're actually speaking Hindi, instead of self-consciously speaking Sanskritised Hindi in a formal register -- and this is always in the context of a specific political alignment.

> By this reasoning Urdu is the most widely spoken language of India.

Exactly! Couldn't have worded it better.

अवश्य - Avashya

It is closer to "Certainly"

Yes, but I didn't say there was no word in formal Hindi that didn't mean the same thing as 'zaroor'. I said 'nishchit' isn't that word.

'Avashya' is again a word you wouldn't be able to use in colloquial speech without coming across as eccentric. It means the same thing as 'zaroor' but it's like saying "I am desirous of x" instead of "I want x".

My grandmother was illiterate, but I remember her using Avashya even when she did not speak Khari boli much

I've grown up in North India and have never word anyone speak the word "avashya" outside of a Hindi lesson. I can only assume your grandmother was using it as an exemplar for your benefit. Perhaps there are communities where it is spoken colloquially but by far the norm is "zaroor" or "jaroor" (same word but the sound has shifted in some places like Western UP from Z to J).

You can find examples of the use of "avashya" in the movies of Hrishikesh Mukherjee (like Golmaal and Chupke-Chupke) in which off-beat characters who made a special point of speaking the purest Hindi as part of their characters' eccentricity used "avashya" and other words like it, while the other characters who spoke normal Hindi didn't.

That's like saying: "Star is a Latin word. English is tungol. Just because English speakers say star all the time doesn't make it English."

It depends. For what an urdu speaking person will use "Zaroor", a hindi speaking person would use "Avashya".

Even the Hindiest of the Hindi-speaking people, e.g. in Uttarakhand say "zaroor".

You will only find someone like a Hindi teacher or a priest using a word like "avashya" when they're trying to signal that they are educated and thus speaking in the 'pure' register. In the natural language of Hindi, the word used is 'zaroor'. Using 'avashya' is speaking a conlang, pretty much.

Is there a script you find "better" between the Hindi and Urdu one?

I can't say better but I learned Urdu for 10 years in school as opposed to Hindi which was taught for just a year or so. As a result I find the Urdu (Persian) script easier to read but I don't think one is better than the other. Probably a linguist expert could compare the Arabic/Persian script to the Devanagri one and try to explain pros and cons of both. That would be an interesting read.

The Hindi script is easier for a foreign learner to deal with, because it more accurately maps to the phonemes of the language. So it's possible to "sound out" an unknown Hindi word from the written form, and get it fairly close to correct. With the Urdu script, this is more difficult, as many of the vowels are left unwritten or under-differentiated.

(For a trivial example, is اس the word /ɪs/ "this" or /ʊs/ "that"? In Devanagari, they're clearly different, इस vs उस. Urdu script can distinguish them, by adding a diacritic to the ا, but it's usually omitted, leaving the reader to infer the intended word from context. For a native speaker, that's not usually a problem, but for a learner it can be an added challenge.)

On the other hand, I suspect the Urdu script might be faster for an experienced writer to use, as there's a beautiful simplicity and smoothness to its cursive forms, compared to the relatively complex shapes of many Devanagari letters.

> Urdu script can distinguish them, by adding a diacritic to the ا, but it's usually omitted

Not in my experience and certainly not as a student. I'm not an expert but at my school اس for something that sounds exactly as /ɪs/ would be considered completely invalid. Only اِس would be considered correct. Actually, I think اِز (more like iz) might be more correct phonetically.

In school, perhaps so. But looking at something like https://ur.wikipedia.org/wiki/اردو, there's scarcely more than a handful of short vowel marks (zabar, zer, pesh, or fatha, kasra, damma as an Arabic speaker would call them) anywhere on the page; the vast majority are left unwritten.

While I'm not 100% sure, I think it _might_ be the case of writing Urdu online vs on paper. I'll try to grab an Urdu book or newspaper tomorrow and see how it is written. Thanks for the insight, this was very interesting.

If you look at say Jang, you will almost never see the diacritics except maybe in headlines

Devanagiri script has one drawback for non-native speakers though, which is identifying the schwa syncope rule. All Devnagiri consonants always carry an implicit schwa unless otherwise modified by a diacritic. However, in Hindustani, this schwa is sometimes dropped, and it is not always obvious where or when it should be dropped to a non-native speaker.

Another issue is the allophony of the schwas surrounding ह (/h/) in words like कहना which is actually pronounced [kɛɦɛnaː] and not [kəɦ(ə)naː]. (note that this is also an instance of the schwa deletion)

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