The poisonous potency of script: Hindi and Urdu

Abstract

Hindi and Urdu are variants of the same language characterized by extreme digraphia: Hindi is written in the Devanagari script from left to right, Urdu in a script derived from a Persian modi®cation of Arabic script written from right to left. High variants of Hindi look to Sanskrit for inspiration and linguistic enrichment, high variants of Urdu to Persian and Arabic. Hindi and Urdu diverge from each other cumulatively, mostly in vocabulary, as one moves from the bazaar to the higher realms, and in their highest Ð and therefore most arti®cial Ð forms the two languages are mutually incomprehensible. The battle between Hindi and Urdu, the graphemic con¯ict in particular, was a major ¯ash point of Hindu/Muslim

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