KARACHI: Languages independent of religion and race
By Our Staff Reporter
KARACHI, March 24: Languages have nothing to do with religions and races as they are a means of communication and most of them have their deepest roots in Mesopotamia, which was the mother of European, Indian and Middle Eastern civilizations.
This was stated by Dr Abdul Jamil Khan, author of a book titled Politics of Languages, recently published from New York, at a meeting at the Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology (SSUET) on Friday.
Dr Khan dispelled the general belief that Hindi and Urdu were born from Sanskrit, which itself came from Germany.
He said the oldest Indian farmers from the Middle East were Dravidian-speaking people who, after interacting with the oldest Indian tribes, Austric-Munda-speakers, must have created the first hybrid language, which, in its own turn, exchanged vocabularies with the latest arrivals (about 1,000 BC), the Sanskrit-speaking people from the Middle East and not from Germany, as commonly propagated.
“The resultant hybrid language is called Prakrit, e.g. Pali language of Ashokan inscription (280 BC),” he said.
Dr Khan said following the arrival of Muslims in the 8th century, this Prakrit got further hybridized with Arabic and Persian words and began to be written in Arabic-Persian scripts.
“This was given a new name — Hindi — by Amir Khusro in the 14th century and by the late Mughal period, it has been known as Urdu or Hindustani.”
According to him, the British adopted Urdu as an administrative language in 1835 and at the same time started a new Hindi for Hindus by replacing some 20,000 words with newly formed Sanskrit words and reactivating the Devnagri script.
He said Sanskrit and its script came from the Aramaic system and it was written in both directions, as was Greek script.
Z.A. Nizami, Chancellor of SSUET, presided over the meeting, which was attended by the university’s VC Dr Nazir Ahmed, professors and intellectuals.
