ما شاء الله

Learning Urdu has been one of the most fascinating, exhilarating, albeit in a unhealthily solipsistic way, experiences of my life. By chance one day I looked at the BBC Urdu page after having studied Hindi for a year and I realized that all of the Hindi words I felt like I knew somehow in some unconscious way were in fact lifted from Arabic in some far-off magical historical moment. For example, the word "effect" as a verb. In Hindi it's असर करना । The word was phonetically familiar and I picked it up without hesitance. It was not until I saw the Arabic script Urdu equivalent اثر كرنا which was a quick "Oh! I get it The th morphed into S through the magic of morphophonology and ta-da" I tried to resist the temptation to study Urdu, hoping to be introduced into the linguistic cultural sanskritic universe, but why learn विश्वविद्यालय">विश्वविद्यालय when you can just guess the word is جامعة, why struggle to pick apart the Sandhi प्रतियोगिता स्वतन्त्रता"> when you can use مقابلة. It took a little while to piece together which weird squiggly lines that weren't in Arabic corresponded to the vowels in hindustani, but before long I saw how میں سمجھ رہا ہوں was just some creative adaption for में समझ रहा हूँ। Today I spoke to this girl who speaks Urdu and Arabic and anytime I didn't know some Urdu word I sort of improvised, which maybe even made me sound like a highbrow pious pakistani, heh heh?But it's nice, for an aspiring polyglot to find out he's got one in the bag he didn't even know he had, which is actually even easier than the painstaking etymological quest into Sankrit, and all the trouble I went through to learn Arabic verb calculus counts twice. ساری تعریف اللہ کے لئے ہے