Urdu
Language family: Indo-European
Language group: Indic
Geographical use: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Singapore, Qatar, Oman and on Mauritius
Information: Urdu is actually the same
language as Hindi, but for political reasons
another name is maintained.
The most important difference between Hindi
and Urdu are: Hindi gets its vocabulary mainly
from Sanskrit, Urdu
from Persian and Arabic.
Hindi is written with the Devanagari
script, Urdu with the Arabic script.
Hindi is spoken mainly by Hindus, Urdu
by Muslims, both in India and Pakistan.
<The following is copied from dawn.com on 15 June 2009:>
How
many letters are there in the Urdu alphabet? I wish I could answer this
question in unambiguous terms. But the controversy over the total and
correct number of letters in Urdu alphabet has been raging for over 200
years now. The reason why I am dredging it up today is that Muqtadira
Qaumi Zaban or the National Language Authority (NLA), the official
authority responsible for preparing Urdu for implementation as an
official language, has declared that Urdu has exactly 58 letters. Many
may take exception to this declaration.
Insha Allah Khan Insha
(1756/57-1818), a witty and intelligent poet and prose writer of Urdu
who was the first to use English words in Urdu ghazals, wrote in 1808
‘Darya-i-latafat’. It is the first book ever written by a native
speaker on the Urdu language and its grammar.
Though appreciably
ingenious and a connoisseur of the language, he is a bit erratic when
it comes to the total number of Urdu letters and gives different
figures: at one point he writes that Urdu has 85 letters and then
elsewhere he puts the figure at 86. In the same book, on another
occasion he has raised the number to 91 and even to 92. Earlier,
Benjamin Schulz, a German missionary, had written ‘A grammar of
Hindustani language’ in Latin in 1741. He had listed only 32 Urdu
letters and excluded all letters denoting aspirant sounds as well as
some other letters because he wrongly believed that Urdu was just a
dialect of Persian.
Till the first quarter of the last century,
there was a kind of tacit consensus on the total number of letters in
Urdu alphabet and it was generally believed that Urdu had 35 or at the
most 36 letters. Most of the Urdu primers and readers written with a
view to teaching basic Urdu gave 36 ‘single’ or ‘un-compounded’ letters
that were followed by separately listed ‘compound’ letters denoting
aspirant sounds such as bh, ph, kh, chh, etc. It was Baba-i-Urdu Moulvi
Abdul Haq who for the first time announced that the symbols denoting
aspirant sounds ought to be given the full status of letters and,
therefore, the words beginning with them should be properly sequenced
in Urdu dictionaries.
In 1930, Baba-e-Urdu began the gigantic
task of compiling ‘Lughat-i-kabeer’, the most comprehensive Urdu-Urdu
dictionary that was to have each and every word of Urdu with
illustrative citations. The project could not go according to the plan
and after 1947 it was merged with the Urdu Dictionary Board (UDB),
which was entrusted with an identical task of compiling a monumental
dictionary and Baba-i-Urdu was appointed its first Chief Editor. A
little earlier, Ghulam Rasool, a scholar and editor of Lahore’s
‘Inqelab’, had declared in an article on Urdu short-hand (that was
published by ‘Zamana’, Kanpur) that Urdu had 52 letters.
As
Baba-i-Urdu had done the spadework and had chalked out guidelines for
such a huge dictionary – and it included streamlining the sequence and
number of letters in Urdu alphabet – when the first volume of UDB’s
dictionary came out in 1977, it followed the basic scheme of letters
accommodating aspirant sounds as envisioned by Moulvi Abdul Haq. The
UDB also decided that Urdu had 53 letters.
Since then, the
sequence and number of Urdu letters decided by the UDB was generally
followed. Though at times unscrupulous publishers and writers of Urdu
primers deviated from this, perhaps because of their lack of knowledge,
the pattern was generally followed in Pakistan. In India, though, some
scholars, especially Shams-ur-Rahman Farooqi, objected to this and
emphasised that the ‘reformation’ was uncalled-for and that one should
follow the vogue rather than linguistics. Prof Masood Hasan Khan, an
Indian linguist and scholar of repute, took exception to this and
supported the scheme followed by the UDB. Here I must mention an
interesting fact: a few years ago, Shams-ur-Rahman Farooqi wrote
‘Lughaat-i-rozmarra’, a book on the correct usage of Urdu, and insisted
that Urdu had 35 letters (p.47). In the same book, he gave a list
mentioning the number and correct sequence of Urdu letters — expelling
the aspirant sounds — and the list shows 38 of them (p.46), quite
conveniently forgetting the number mentioned on the next page.
For
the last five years or so, Dr Atash Durrani of the NLA has been
promoting the idea that Urdu has 58 letters and even in some
publications of the Authority the claim has been repeated. The logic
followed by him is that the computerisation of Urdu requires certain
letters that do not exist in Urdu alphabet but are used in writing
Urdu. Many scholars disagree with him.
Here I must first admit
that Dr Durrani has been relentlessly working for Urdu’s
computerisation for the last 10 years or so and has played a vital role
in it along with NUST, FAST, the NLA and other institutions and
individuals who have made it their life’s goal to catapult Urdu into
the cyberspace and into the next century. But the question is: why does
the English language has the same 26 letters and yet the
computerisation and cyber-age have not had any effect on it? In his new
book ‘Urdu ittelaiyaat’ Dr Atash Durrani, while making out a case for
58 letters, has answered the question. He says that International
Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) has solved many problems for English as far as
pronunciation is concerned and since Urdu does not have such a system
it will have to have new letters to be able to correctly and fully show
the sounds that certain Urdu words have but Urdu letters do not
represent them properly. Dr Durrani has his own reasoning and sees
everything from a technological point of view, but in his enthusiasm
for cyber Urdu he has perhaps gone a bit too far.
Since he is
looking after the Centre of Excellence for Urdu Informatics at the NLA,
his word is from the horse’s mouth. But he admits that scholars
disagree on the five letters that he has added to Urdu alphabet.
The
book is a collection of articles Dr Durrani has written from time to
time on Urdu Informatics. Published by the NLA, the book opens new
vistas for techno geeks who love Urdu. Prof Fateh Muhammad Malik in his
preface says that “the NLA has the credit of having taken the first
step towards making Urdu the language of computer and towards
standardisation of Urdu characters for Urdu software…With Dr Atash
Durrani’s hard work and vision Urdu has got a conspicuous position in
the domain of technology. As a result the technological use of Urdu
came in vogue at many universities, ISO, Microsoft, mobile companies
and many other institutions”. He hopes that this beginning today
provides a solid foundation for Urdu’s brighter tomorrow in a world
that is steeped in technology.
The lovers of Urdu are naturally
rejoiced at the inception of a new discipline named Urdu Informatics
and no doubt Dr Durrani has played a pioneering role in it but one
feels that sensitive issues like the number of letters in the Urdu
alphabet need a consensus. Before heading forward, we must remember
that many authorities such as Moulvi Abdul Haq, Dr Abdus Sattat
Siddiqui, Dr Syed Abdullah, Shan-ul-Haq Haqqee, Syed Qudrat Naqvi,
Suhail Bukhari, Rasheed Hasan Khan, Jameel Jalibi, Farman Fatehpuri,
Waheed Qureshi, Gopi Chand Narang, Gian Chand Jain, Ab-ul-Lais
Siddiqui, Shams-ur-Rahman Farooqi, Prof Masood Hasan Khan and Moinuddin
Aqeel etc. have had different and at times even conflicting views over
such issues.
The NLA must not be oblivious of sensitivities such
as Urdu script, Urdu orthography, Urdu alphabet and number of letters
that have caused bitter and prolonged controversies in the past. Aside
from that aspect, the book is a must for the students of Urdu,
informatics and, of course, Urdu Informatics.
