Language desk
< September 1	<< Aug \| September \| Oct >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

September 2

Is Hindi a dialect of Urdu?

This discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

sir, is hindi a dialect of Urdu, because i found many proofs that Hindi is a dialect of Urdu like In olden times, Sanskrit was not allowed to be spoken by anyone, because Sanskrit was spoken by the Gods of Hindus. the result was that Sanskrit started to end. Hindus had to save their tongue. So they stole Urdu and Hindi came into existence after replacing Arabic and Persian alphabets with some Sanskrit alphas in it. the word Hindi means Indian or related to India. read more from http://www.qmuannt.blogspot.com/2019/09/how-hindi-has-come.html - PK-IN User (talk) 1:42, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

For a summary of more scholarly sources, please read Hindustani language as Hindi and Urdu are both standardized registers of a single language: Hindustani. Also of interest would be Hindi and Urdu, particularly the history and origin sections of these articles.--William Thweatt ^Talk^Contribs 20:59, 1 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

sir, is hindi a dialect of urdu or not? — Preceding unsigned comment added by PK-IN User (talk • contribs) 21:04, 1 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

PK-IN -- there probably were and are a fairly large number of peasants in north-central India who care more about their struggles for daily existence than they do about Persian or Sanskrit. Urdu is the speech of some of those peasants enhanced into a medium of literature with Persian-language words and written with a highly-modified form of the Arabic alphabet, while Hindi is the speech of some of those peasants enhanced into a medium of literature with Sanskrit-language words, and written in Devanagari (a native Indic alphabet, and the alphabet that most Westerners encounter Sanskrit in, though of course there is no such thing as a "Sanskrit alphabet").

Sanskrit itself is totally out of consideration as the language of modern India -- it was already archaic in the lifetime of the Buddha Sakyamuni roughly 2,500 years ago, who advised his disciples to use a form of speech closer to people's everyday language at the time when promulgating Buddha's teachings. India has gone through three or four cycles of major language evolution (prakrit, apabhramsa / Middle Indic, Modern Indic) since the time of Sanskrit...

The language of Indian/Hindu nationalism in the 19th century and early 20th century was apparently more often "Sanskritized Bengali" (see Vande Mataram, Bengali Renaissance) rather than either Sanskrit or Hindi... AnonMoos (talk) 05:32, 2 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Botswana

If someone from England is English and someone from France is French and someone from America is American, what do you call someone from Botswana? Thanks Anton 81.131.40.58 (talk) 10:48, 2 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Discussed here: [1], [2]. 2A00:23C5:C708:8C00:F9BD:4AA2:E725:EC8C (talk) 11:30, 2 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Of course, we have an article: List of adjectival and demonymic forms for countries and nations. --Xuxl (talk) 12:02, 2 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Botswanan would be the obvious, and that indeed is what's on the list. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:31, 2 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Is that a less popular form? Articles I have read about the country agree with 2A00's references: one person from Botswana is a Motswana and several people from Botswana are Batswana. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 17:54, 2 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That suggests that the sound of the first letter of the name is kind of hard to render in English. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:46, 2 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

No Baseball Bugs, it doesn't. See Tswana language#Nouns for an indication of what's going on. --ColinFine (talk) 22:21, 2 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

And more generally Bantu languages#Noun class; Tswana, like most languages of Africa south of the equator, is of that family. —Tamfang (talk) 20:15, 6 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Aha. So the answer to the OP's question "what do you call someone from Botswana?" depends on whether it's one or multiple persons. Prefix indicating singular or plural. An interesting way to do things. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:50, 2 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Botswana/Motswana vs Botswanan is also a case of endonym vs exonym. The few times I've come across such references, they have been of the form "Botswanan", but endonyms are generally more used today than they were in the past (while not necessarily being the most common usage). So, the answer also depends on whether you want to force the rules of Tswana language onto English usage or modify words from Tswana to fit English usage. --Khajidha (talk) 18:53, 3 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]