Feb. 2nd, 2007 03:50 pm
Panjabi vs. Hindi
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muckefuckBefore I got this cricket in my head about learning Panjabi, I tried to pick up some Hindi from McGregor's Outline of Hindi grammar. It's an excellent text, well-organised and comprehensive, but the exercises all use Devanagari, which I couldn't be arsed to learn. (SSC: Unlike other language freaks, like ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aadroma, I really suck at learning new scripts and try to avoid it as much as possible.)
Now I find that Shackle's lessons are stirring up vague memories, so I keep referring back to McGregor to make comparisons. The resemblances are really striking, particularly in syntax and lexicon--moreso, it seems, than between Hindi and other adjoining Indo-Aryan varieties. But I suppose that's not too suprising given that standard Hindi is based chiefly on the varieties of Western Hindustani spoken around the city of Delhi and standard Panjabi is based on the Majhi variety of Eastern Panjabi spoken around Lahore and Amritsar, a mere 400 km. away across what is basically open ground. (For comparison, that's 100 km. closer than Madrid and Lisbon, which also have mountain ranges to cross.) From what I've been reading, the Western Panjabi varieties of Pakistan (particularly Siraiki) are very different, as are Eastern Hindi varieties, such as Bhojpuri. Also, the speech of Delhi has apparently been very much influenced by Panjabi (which is the second official language of Delhi even today.)
Of course, these similarities make the differences, where they occur, all the more noticeable. I'm particularly struck by the fact that almost none of the common postpositions are the same. Consider:
PAN -- HIN -- ENG
dā -- kā "of"
nūṁ -- se "to"
tōṁ -- se "from"
(ut)te -- par "on"
(vi)c -- meṁ "in"
koɭ -- ke pās "beside"
What makes this so unusual is, as I mentioned above, the syntax is otherwise so similar--often identical. For instance, both standard varieties express possession with postpositions rather than verbs (i.e. I don't "have" something, it "is at" or "near" me), both make nearly identical alienable/inalienable distinctions, but they use different words to do so. Compare these clauses for "I don't have money" (lit. "beside me money is not").
Panjabi: mere koɭ paise náīṁ
Hindi: mere pās paise nahīm hai
Aside from the fact that Panjabi allows the deletion of "to be" after the negative in the present tense, these two sentences are word-for-word translations of each other; if not for the postpositions, they'd be absolutely the same.
I had a look through the Routledge volume The Indo-Aryan languages for some more on the historical development of these varieties and found what seems to be a partial explanation on p. 279:
aadroma, I really suck at learning new scripts and try to avoid it as much as possible.)Now I find that Shackle's lessons are stirring up vague memories, so I keep referring back to McGregor to make comparisons. The resemblances are really striking, particularly in syntax and lexicon--moreso, it seems, than between Hindi and other adjoining Indo-Aryan varieties. But I suppose that's not too suprising given that standard Hindi is based chiefly on the varieties of Western Hindustani spoken around the city of Delhi and standard Panjabi is based on the Majhi variety of Eastern Panjabi spoken around Lahore and Amritsar, a mere 400 km. away across what is basically open ground. (For comparison, that's 100 km. closer than Madrid and Lisbon, which also have mountain ranges to cross.) From what I've been reading, the Western Panjabi varieties of Pakistan (particularly Siraiki) are very different, as are Eastern Hindi varieties, such as Bhojpuri. Also, the speech of Delhi has apparently been very much influenced by Panjabi (which is the second official language of Delhi even today.)
Of course, these similarities make the differences, where they occur, all the more noticeable. I'm particularly struck by the fact that almost none of the common postpositions are the same. Consider:
PAN -- HIN -- ENG
dā -- kā "of"
nūṁ -- se "to"
tōṁ -- se "from"
(ut)te -- par "on"
(vi)c -- meṁ "in"
koɭ -- ke pās "beside"
What makes this so unusual is, as I mentioned above, the syntax is otherwise so similar--often identical. For instance, both standard varieties express possession with postpositions rather than verbs (i.e. I don't "have" something, it "is at" or "near" me), both make nearly identical alienable/inalienable distinctions, but they use different words to do so. Compare these clauses for "I don't have money" (lit. "beside me money is not").
Panjabi: mere koɭ paise náīṁ
Hindi: mere pās paise nahīm hai
Aside from the fact that Panjabi allows the deletion of "to be" after the negative in the present tense, these two sentences are word-for-word translations of each other; if not for the postpositions, they'd be absolutely the same.
I had a look through the Routledge volume The Indo-Aryan languages for some more on the historical development of these varieties and found what seems to be a partial explanation on p. 279:
In the early stages of Hindi, we find an extraordinary diversity of postpositional forms, with different early NIA texts displaying different sets of competing forms, alternating with inflected forms, both with and without attached postpostions (Ridgeway, 1986). Gradually the situation tilted in the direction of postpositional usages, with inflected cases severely limited.Thus, we find a quite different situation than with, for instance, the Romance languages, where prepositions emerged earlier and, thus, ended up fairly consistent across modern varieties (albeit less so the further you get from such core words as de, in, and ad).