बस पर / bas par

[muckefuck]

Lest y'all worry that my latest craze will make this journal all Hindi, all the time, let me tell you that I bought a new book yesterday: Teach Yourself Urdu! I was reading it on the shuttle this evening and the fresh-faced South Asian student sitting next to me looked over and said, "Are you learning Urdu?" As a muhajir[*] from Karachi, he was both surprised and pleased to see someone learning his native language. I didn't realise he was getting off so soon, so I didn't have a chance to learn his name, much less ask him to tutor me or anything. Oh well; if the storyline in my textbook is anything to go by, I'll run into him again very soon and he'll invite me to his house to meet the ten people living there and see me stuffed with biryani and sweets.

In any case, I think I may have solved a mystery that was bedeviling mollpeartree. Hindi-Urdu has a general question word क्या kyaa that has the basic meaning of "what?" but can also be inserted at the beginning of any statement without a question word like "where?" or "how?" to make it a question, e.g. क्या आप कराची-वाले हैं? kyaa aap karaachee-waale haiM "Are you a Karachiite?" She had a theory that this kyaa was the basis for the abuse of the tag question "isn't it?" that she saw in Hindi subtitles. I never told her at the time, but I had my doubts for two strong reasons: One, the syntax doesn't match up, since क्या kyaa always comes at the beginning of an utterance and "isn't it?" only at the end. Two, use of the tag "isn't it?" is by no means peculiar to Indian English. Estuary English is rife with it in the form "innit?".

Now, thanks to Matthews and Dalvi, I think I've found a stronger candidate: ना naa, which they call "a short form of....nahīṅ [नहीं]" and which shows an exactly parallel usage, e.g. vahaaM ek baRaa aspataal hai naa "There's a big hospital there, isn't it?", yih khaanaa acchaa hai naa "This food is good, isn't it?" Haven't come across it in McGregor, but he's not really as concerned with teaching the colloquial language, naa?



[*] I know this is considered a negative term by some, but my companion didn't seem to have a problem with it. In fact, when I used the term, he said, "I'm impressed by your knowledge!" Maybe it's effectively neutred in the mouth of a complete outsider.

Comments

[dedalusj.livejournal.com]

What is the difference between Hindi and Urdu? I have been told the difference is which side of the Pakistani-Indian border the speaker is standing on, but I don't really believe it. Moreover, your explanations of these things I trust more and get more out of than what is on the Internet.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

They really are just slight variations on the same dialect, Khaṛī Bolī. At the ordinary colloquial level, there's less difference than between the British English and American English standards. Keep in mind that pretty much the only native speakers of Urdu in Pakistan are those who moved there from India and their descendants. (Muhajir means "refugee".)

There are spoken differences between speakers of various faiths in such things as greetings, familial terms, and even days of the week (e.g. Muslims call Friday jum'a whereas to others it's shukra or shukravaar). But this is also true of English: My Jewish friends often refer to Friday as "Shabbat" and use a special greeting that day.

[dedalusj.livejournal.com]

So they are similar to Croatian and Serbian in that the primary difference is the orthographic system.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

That's a very close analogy--particularly since Croatian has undergone a linguistic purge similar to that of Hindi. So whereas Serbians have no problem with the loanwords fabrika, fudbal, paradajz, etc., the Croatians have replaced them with tvornica, nogomet, rajčica and other neologisms.

[donncha22.livejournal.com]

As to the difference between Hindi and Urdu, I'd just add that the higher up one goes in the written registers, the more Sanskrit words one encounters in Hindi, right up to the replacement of simple words such as "and": तथा instead of और. In Urdu the same happens with increasing numbers of Arabic and Persian words, including the use of Arabic plural forms of nouns. There are also a number of Perso-Arabic sounds that Urdu speakers maintain, while Hindi speakers replace them with sounds from the indigenous sound system. The same sort or replacement can occur with sounds in English words, thus ज़ू (zoo) is commonly pronounced जू (joo). Can you see that dot under the ज in the first instance? It's almost invisible on my screen.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

I'm sorry I haven't been participated in learn_hindi so far. I'm just not to the point of being able to read or write entire words in devenagari yet. (I'm almost done with consonants, vowels next). Though in your transliterated answer to "why are you learning Hindi," I spied what looked like a possessive followed by "dost" and figured what you were saying was something like, "My friend is trying to learn Hindi", and I thought, "Hey he's talking about ME there!" Maybe.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Oh, you are a sly one! The only reason I didn't call you by name is that you hadn't made your presence in learn_hindi known yet and I thought it would be embarrassing to mention it in a sentence that you yourself couldn't read.

According to TYU, using dost for a female friend might be something you could get away with in the topsy-turvy world of the West, but in Pakistan you'd better stick to sahelee for female friends. (That said, I'm sure I've seen "meree dost" in the lyrics to Bollywood songs before.)

[donncha22.livejournal.com]

When I lived in India, long ago, the all purpose question tag was "hai na?" है न ? , very like "innit?" Which, besides Estuary English, is common among some Native Americans out here in the West.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

तुम हिंदुस्तान में कब रहा था?

[donncha22.livejournal.com]

तुम ... थे

लगभग चालीस साल हुए ।

scarred forever by the 80s

[his-regard.livejournal.com]

She said, "Captain!"
I said, "क्या?"
She said, "Captain!"
I said, "क्या?"
She said, "Captain!"
I said, "क्या?"
She said, "Captain!"
I said, "क्या you want?"

[teapot-farm.livejournal.com]

But 'innit' works much more like the way you describe 'naa' above, than like 'isn't it' in standard English, which makes me wonder whether it's partly come from British-Asians' use of English in the Urdu pattern (does that make it back-formation from Urdu? Something like that). I associate it more specifically with South London than with general Estuary English, which is an area with a fairly big Asian community. Using 'Asian' to mean 'Indian or Pakistani' rather than 'Chinese / Japanese' in this case.
Also, does 'naa' work the same as 'ma' in Mandarin?
I did a term's worth of Hindi-Urdu at university, and am firmly resisting learning more, because life is too damn short for ANOTHER language to be learnt... I can remember 'meera naam Gillian hai', that'll have to do.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Mandarin ma, although sentence final, is closer in usage to kyaa. kyaa aap karaachee-waale haiM answers perfectly to 您是喀拉蚩人嗎? nín shì kǎlāchī rén ma? For tag questions, Mandarin uses phrases like 是不是 shìbushì "be not be", 對不對 duìbuduì "right not right", etc. as tag questions. 您是喀拉蚩人,是不是? "You're a Karachiite, aren't you?"