Indian borrowings in english

     The other use of the word "Hindi" is in reference to Standard Hindi, the Khari Boli register of the Delhi dialect of Hindi (generally called Hindustani) with its direct loanwords from Sanskrit. Standard Urdu is also a standardized form of Hindustani. Such a state of affairs, with two standardized forms of what is essentially one language, is known as a diasystem.

     The term "Urdu" (which is cognate with the English word "horde") descends from the phrase Zabān-e-Urdū-e-Mu`Allah (زبانِ اردوِ معلہ), lit., the "Exalted Language of the [military] Camp". The terms "Hindi" and "Urdu" were used interchangeably even by Urdu poets like Mir and Mirza Ghalib of the early 19th century (more often, however, the terms Hindvi/Hindi were used); while British officials usually understood the term "Urdu" to refer solely to the writing system and not to a language at all. By 1850, there was growing use of the terms "Hindi" and "Urdu" to differentiate among different dialects of the Hindustani language. However, linguists such as Sir G. A. Grierson (1903) continued to recognize the close relationship between the emerging standard Urdu and the Western Hindi dialects of Hindustani. Before the Partition of India, Delhi, Lucknow, Aligarh and Hyderabad used to be the four literary centers of Urdu.

     The colloquial language spoken by the people of Delhi is indistinguishable by ear, whether it is called Hindi or Urdu by its speakers. The only important distinction at this level is in the script: if written in the Perso-Arabic script, the language is generally considered to be Urdu, and if written in Devanagari it is generally considered to be Hindi. However, since independence the formal registers used in education and the media have become increasingly divergent in their vocabulary. Where there is no colloquial word for a concept, Standard Urdu uses Perso-Arabic vocabulary, while Standard Hindi uses Sanskrit vocabulary. This results in the official languages being heavily Sanskritized or Persianized, and nearly unintelligible to speakers educated in the other standard (as far as the formal vocabulary is concerned).

      The Bengali alphabet is derived from the Brahmi alphabet. It is also closely related to the Devanagari alphabet, from which it started to diverge in the 11th Century AD. The current printed form of Bengali alphabet first appeared in 1778 when Charles Wilkins developed printing in Bengali. A few archaic letters were modernised during the 19th century.

      Bengali has two literary styles: one is called Sadhubhasa (elegant language) and the other Chaltibhasa (current language). The former is the traditional literary style based on Middle Bengali of the sixteenth century, while the later is a 20th century creation and is based on the speech of educated people in Calcutta. The differences between the two styles are not huge and involve mainly forms of pronouns and verb conjugations.

      Some people prefer to call this alphabet the Eastern Nagari script or Eastern Neo-Brahmic script

      Notable features

      The Bengali alphabet is a syllabic alphabet in which consonants all have an inherent vowel which has two different pronunciations, the choice of which is not always easy to determine and which is sometimes not pronounced at all.

      Vowels can be written as independent letters, or by using a variety of diacritical marks which are written above, below, before or after the consonant they belong to.

      When consonants occur together in clusters, special conjunct letters are used. The letters for the consonants other than the final one in the group are reduced. The inherent vowel only applies to the final consonant.

      Used to write:

      Bengali, an eastern Indo-Aryan language with around 211 million speakers in Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal and also in Malawi, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Australia, the UAE, UK and USA.

      Assamese, an eastern Indo-Aryan language spoken by about 15 million people in the Indian states of Assam, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh, and also spoken in Bangladesh and Bhutan.

      Manipuri, one of the official languages of the Indian state of Manipur in north-east India and has about 1.1 million speakers. It is a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family, and also has its own alphabet.

      Garo, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by about 800,000 people in the Indian states of Meghalaya and Assam, and also in Bangladesh.

      Mundari, a Munda language with about two million speakers in eastern India, mainly in the Indian state of Bihar, also in Bangladesh and Nepal. It has been written with the Devanagari, Bengali, Oriya and Latin alphabets.

      Marathi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by about 71 million people mainly in the Indian state of Maharashtra and neighbouring states. Marathi is also spoken in Israel and Mauritius. Marathi is thought to be a descendent of Maharashtri, one of the Prakrit languages which developed from Sanskrit.

      Marathi first appeared in writing during the 11th century in the form of inscriptions on stones and copper plates. From the 13th century until the mid 20th century, it was written with the Modi alphabet. Since 1950 it has been written with the Devanāgarī alphabet.

      Standard Marathi is based on dialects used by academics and the print media, and is influenced by the educated élite of the Pune region. Maharashtra Sahitya Parishad (MSP) is the apex guiding body for literary institutions of Marathi language. From time to time, MSP helps out in discourses on various aspects of Marathi and in laying down precedents by framing rules whenever required.

      Indic scholars distinguish 42 dialects of spoken Marathi. Dialects bordering other major language areas have many properties in common with those languages, further differentiating them from standard spoken Marathi. The bulk of the variation within these dialects is primarily lexical and phonological (e.g. accent placement and pronunciation). Although the number of dialects is considerable, the degree of intelligibility within these dialects is relatively high. Historically, the major dialect divisions have been Ahirani, Khandeshi, Varhadi, Zadi Boli, Wadvali, Samavedi and Are Marathi.

      Nepali is an Indo-Aryan language with around 17 million speakers in Nepal, Bhutan, Burma and India. Nepali was originally known as Khas Kurā and was the language of the Khasa kingdom, which ruled over the foothills of what is now Nepal during the 13th and 14th centuries.

      Nepali first started to be used in writing during the 12th century AD. It is written with the Devanāgarī alphabet, which developed from the Brahmi script in the 11th century AD.

      Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language with about 104 million speakers, including those who speak it as a second language. It is the national language of Pakistan and is closely related to Hindi, though a lot of Urdu vocabulary comes from Persian and Arabic, which is not the case for Hindi.

      Urdu is also spoken in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Botswana, Fiji, Germany, Guyana, India, Malawi, Mauritius, Nepal, Norway, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, the UAE, the UK and Zambia.

      Urdu has been written with a version of the Perso-Arabic script since the 12th century and is normally written in Nastaliq style. The word Urdu is Turkish for 'foreign' or 'horde'.

 

2. The main features of American Indian language

      India is the cradle to one of the first civilizations of the world, founded in the banks of the Lower Indus River in Southern India. This culture flourished from 2500 BC, and was named Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, by contemporary archeologists, after the two main cities found in the excavation sites. There were many languages spoken by these inhabitants during this time, and these are collectively known as Dravidian or Dravidian family of languages.

      Though scholars disagree, as to the exact date when Northern India was inhabited, most agree that it maybe a century earlier or later. The inhabitants of this civilization were called the Aryans, since they migrated from the European mainland, from the Caucasian mountainside. They spoke a variety of languages descending from the Indo-European family of languages.

      The geographical barriers of rivers, mountains, deserts and forests made it difficult for these languages to mingle, and hence even today, as one country, the languages and dialects spoken in India are very different from each other - either in written script, spoken words, grammar or tones. Further, the many religions, Gods and deities, caste systems and other social and economical factors; have made it possible to nurture many different languages and dialects, within one country.

      When considering the two important language families of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan, the first languages that burgeoned from them, are dead today, except in literary composition or liturgy. The languages that stem from the Dravidian family, which are still in use are - Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Telegu. These languages are mostly spoken in the South Indian states of Tamilnadu, Karnataka and Kerala.

      The languages spoken in Northern India, flourished from the Indo-Aryan Sanskritic group of the Indo-Iranian branch, which belongs to the larger Indo-European family. Sanskritic, is a completely dead language today, but Sanskrit and Pali, which are the two languages surviving from ancient times, are important even today: Sanskrit is the classical language of India and Hinduism, in which most scriptures (Veda Grantha), epics (Mahabharata, Bhagavat Gita) and ancient literature is written. Pali is used as the liturgical and scholarly language of Theravada Buddhism, as Buddhism first originated in Bihar, India. Most modern languages in North India stems from these two languages, such as Hindi, Urdu, Punajabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi, Kashmir, Sindhi, Konkani, Rajasthani, Assamese and Oriya. ⁹

      In addition to these languages from Dravidian and Indo-European families, there are nearly hundred or more dialects, some containing a mixture of both language families. Hence India today, has fifteen official languages. All currency notes, and ninety per cent of government documents bear the scripts of these fifteen languages.

      With a culture and heritage as variegated and rich as India is, it is not surprising that the English language absorbed as many as five hundred words during this time, and continue to do so even today. The Oxford English Dictionary currently has 700 words of Indian origin.

      Of the words that came into English, there are certain characteristics that are easily recognizable. The first of which that, most words did not have equivalents in English, such as yoga, swastika, khaki, sari, and sati. Some of the words were taken and given a different meaning, as nirvana, kedgeree, Jodhpur. However words were rarely substituted to English words, as it happened during Old English and Middle English periods, with Latin and French words. Rather the words that were borrowed which already had meanings were used to adorn a text or speech since it sounded different and fashionable. Ex: pariah, pundit, purdah.

      The pronunciation too, took a different tone, in these Indian borrowings. The important modifications were mainly seen in the sounds of 't' and 'd'. In the North Indian languages 't' is mostly pronounced as 'th', as in thing; while the 'd' is pronounced as 'th' in this. When a word from this region came to English, the sound came with a hard 't' and 'd' as in dungaree (Hindi) and swastika (Sanskrit). The words that came from South Indian languages meanwhile took the exact opposite course, with 't' and 'd', being pronounced softly or not at all: as in cheroot (Tamil churuttu/shuruttu). This maybe because South Indian languages tend to stress the sounds 't' and 'd' more, which Europeans may have considered to be disagreeable to their ear.

      Further there are some words which today, we hardly consider as being of Indian origin, such as ginger. This word, although coming to English today as a Latin borrowing, actually has its origin in Dravidian. Some words that have come to English from French or Portuguese have their first roots in an Indian language, such as palanquin & indigo.

 

2.1. Grammatical characteristics

      Diversity rather than common traits characterizes the grammar of South American Indian languages. Features commonly encountered seem to reflect facts of frequency in general typology rather than traits specific to this area. The greatest number of languages are probably suffixing languages like Quechumaran and Huitotoan, or use many suffixes and some prefixes like Arawakan and Panoan. Also very numerous are those languages having few prefixes and suffixes, such as Ge, Carib, or Tupian. Languages employing only prefixes to show grammatical distinctions have not been reported. There are a few with many prefixes but still more suffixes (Jebero, or Chébero); others, like Ona and Tehuelche, with almost no affixing, are also rare.

      Similarly, the complexity of words varies a great deal. In Guaraní words with three components and in Piro (Arawakan) words with six elements are of average complexity for the respective languages. In languages like the Cariban or Tupian ones, word roots are nominal (nouns) or verbal (verbs) and may be converted into the other class by derivational affixes; in languages like Quechua or Araucanian, many word roots are both nominal and verbal. Languages like Yuracare form many words by reduplication (the repetition of a word or a part of a word), a process that does not occur systematically in the Tupian languages. Compounding, the joining of two or more words to form new words, is a very widespread type of word formation, but it can be nearly absent, as in the Chon languages. Verb stems in which the nominal (noun) object is incorporated are also rather frequent. Many languages are of the agglutinative type (Quechuan, Panoan, Araucanian); i.e., they combine several elements of distinctive meaning into a single word without changing the element. Others (Cariban, Tupian) show a moderate amount of change and fusion of the elements when combined in words.

      Grammatically marked gender in nouns occurs in Guaycuruan (Guaicuruan), and a difference in masculine and feminine gender in the verb occurs in Arawakan, Huitotoan (Witotoan), and Tucanoan, but genderless languages are more common. Singular and plural in the 3rd person (“he, she, it”) is not obligatorily distinguished in Tupian and Cariban, but languages like Yámana and Araucanian have singular, dual, and plural. A very common distinction is that between inclusive 1st person (“you and I,” hearer included) and exclusive 1st person (“he and I,” hearer excluded). Pronominal forms differentiated according to categories that indicate whether the person is present or absent, sitting or standing, and so forth occur in Guaycuruan languages and Movima. Case relations in nouns are generally expressed by suffixes or postpositions; the use of prepositions is rare. Possession is indicated predominantly by prefixes or suffixes, and systems in which possessive forms are the same as those used as the subject of intransitive verbs and as the object of transitive ones are rather common. Classificatory affixes that subclassify nouns according to the shape of the object occur in the Chibchan, Tucanoan, and Waican groups.

      Very frequently the verbal forms express the subject, object, and negation in the same word. The categories of tense and aspect seem to be about evenly represented in South American languages, but the specific categories expressed vary a great deal from language to language: Aguaruna (Jívaroan) has a future form and three past forms differentiated as to relative remoteness, while in Guaraní the difference is basically between future and nonfuture. Other languages like Jebero express fundamentally modal categories. Very common are affixes indicating movement, chiefly toward and away from the speaker, and location (e.g., in Quechumaran, Záparo, Itonama), and in some stocks like Arawakan and Panoan there are many suffixes in the verb with very concrete adverbial meaning, such as “by night,” “during the day.” Classificatory affixes indicating the way the action is performed—by biting, striking, walking—occur in Jebero and Tikuna (Ticuna). Actions done individually or collectively are differentiated paradigmatically in Carib, while in Yámana and Jívaro different verbal stems are used according to whether the subject or the object is singular or plural. There are also various languages (Guaycuruan, Wichí, Cocama) in which some words have different forms according to the sex of the speaker.

      Equational sentences are very common. These are formed by juxtaposing two nominal expressions (nouns) without a linking verb, a fact that usually correlates with the absence of a verb “be” for expressing identification or location (e.g., “John good man,” “my house there”). Sentences in which the predicate is a noun inflected like a verb with the meaning “being” or “having” that thing designated by the noun also occur in Bororo and Huitoto (Witoto); e.g., “I–knife” = “I have a knife.” Sentences in which the subject is the undergoer of the action are frequent, but true passive sentences in which the undergoer and the agent are expressed are rare, though they do occur in Huitoto. Subordinate sentences are rarely introduced by conjunctions; subordination is usually expressed by postposed elements or special forms of the verbs such as gerunds, participles, or subordinate conjugations.

 

2.2. Phonological characteristics

      As in grammar, there are no phonological features common to all South American languages that would be specific to them alone. The number of distinctive sounds (phonemes) may vary from 42 in Jaqaru (Quechumaran) to 17 in Campa (Arawakan). Jaqaru has 36 consonants, while Makushí (Cariban) has 11; some Quechuan languages have only three vowels, whereas Apinayé (Macro–Ge) has ten oral vowels and seven nasal ones. A dialect of Tucano (Tucanoan) exhibits three contrasting points of articulation, while Chipaya (Macro-Mayan) has nine. Many types of contrasting sounds occur although not with equal frequency. Voiceless stops (e.g., p, t, k) occur everywhere, but voiced stops (e.g., b, d, g) may be absent, and fricatives (e.g., f, v, s, z) may be few in number. Glottalized voiceless stops—consonants made with simultaneous closure of the glottis and without vibration of the vocal cords—are rather common (Quechumaran, Chibchan), but not glottalized voiced stops (in which the vocal cords vibrate). Also less frequent are aspirated (Quechumaran) and palatalized sounds (Puinave); glottalized nasal sounds (Movima) and voiceless laterals (l-like sounds, as in Vilela) are rare. A distinction between velar and postvelar sounds occurs in Quechumaran and Chon, between velar and labiovelar in Tacana and Siona (Sioni); palatal retroflex consonants, made with the tip of the tongue turned up touching the palate, occur in Pano-Tacanan and Chipaya.

      Systems with nasal vowels are common (Macro-Ge, Sabelan), but in several languages (Tupian, Waican) nasalization is a feature not of vowels and consonants but of whole words. There is an apparent absence of front rounded vowels (ü, ö), but central or back unrounded vowels (ɨ, ï) are common. Systems with long vowels occur in Chipaya and some Cariban languages, and glottalized vowels occur in Tikuna and Chon languages. Very common are pitch-stress systems with high and low tones on stressed syllables; e.g., in Panoan, Huitotoan, and Chibchan. More complex systems with three tones as in Acaricuara, four as in Mundurukú (Mundurucú), and five as in Tikuna are rare. Syllables are generally without complex consonant clusters.

      The typology proposed by Tadeusz Milewski, a Polish linguist, classifies American Indian languages into three types: (1) Atlantic, with few oral consonants but complex systems of nasal consonants, and oral and nasal vowels, of which the Ge languages would be typical; (2) Pacific, with complex systems of oral consonants (many contrasting points and modes of articulation) but with few nasal consonants and few vowels, as exemplified by Quechumaran; and (3) Central, with consonant systems more like the Pacific type and vowel systems like the Atlantic, of which Chibcha would be typical. The typology is probably too gross to accommodate meaningfully every language type found in South America, but it holds to a certain extent, especially for the Atlantic type (Macro-Ge, Tupian, and Cariban).

 

2.3. Vocabulary

      Indian languages vary significantly in the number of loanwords from Spanish and Portuguese. Massive borrowing has taken place in areas where languages have been in intense and continued contact with Spanish or Portuguese, especially where groups are economically dependent on the national life of the country and there is a considerable number of bilingual persons, as in Quechuan, or where no cultural differences correlate with language differences, as in Paraguayan Guaraní. Borrowings have not been limited to designations of artifacts of European origin but affect all spheres of vocabulary, having displaced native terms in many cases. Neither are they limited to lexical items; they include function elements such as prepositions, conjunctions, and derivative suffixes. Sound systems have also been modified. In some contact situations in which the Indian group displayed an antagonistic attitude toward the European conquest, purism developed and loans are comparatively few; e.g., Araucanian. When contact has been frequent but superficial, loanwords are usually scant, but the meaning of native terms has shifted or new descriptive terms have been coined to designate new cultural traits, as in Tehuelche.