Urdu/Hindi: An Artificial Divide

📖 The Scoop

In a blow against the British Empire, Khan suggests that London deliberately set India's Hindu and Muslim populations against each other in the 1800s by artificially splitting their one language in two, then burying the evidence in obscure scholarly works outside the public view. "Divide and rule" - the British were experts at that. All language is political - and so is the boundary between one language and another. The author analyzes the origins of Urdu, one of the earliest known languages, and propounds the iconoclastic views that, (1) Hindi came from pre-Aryan Dravidian and Austric-Munda (rooted in the Middle East/Mesopotamia), not from Aryan Sanskrit, and (2) Hindi's script came from the Aramaic system, similar to Greek. Urdu/Hindi: An Artificial Divide integrates the "out of Africa" linguistic evolution theory with the fossil linguistics of the Middle East, and discards the theory that Sanskrit descended from a hypothetical proto-Indo European language and by degeneration created dialects, Urdu/Hindi and others. It shows that several tribes from the Middle East created the hybrid by cumulative evolution. The oldest groups, Austric and Dravidian, starting in 8000 BC, provided the grammar/syntax plus about 60% of vocabulary, Sanskrit added 10% after 1500 BC and Arabic/Persian 20-30% after AD 800. The book reveals Mesopotamia as the linguistic melting pot of Sumerian, Babylonian, Elamite, Hittite-Hurrian-Mitanni, with a common script and vocabularies shared mutually and passed on to Indo-European, Sanskrit, Dravidian, Arabic and then to Hindi/Urdu; in fact the author locates oldest evidence of Sanskrit in Syria. The book exposes the myths of Sanskrit or Hebrew as "revealed" languagesand examines the fiction of linguistic races, i.e. Aryan, Semitic. The book supports the "one world concept" and reveals the potential of Urdu/Hindi to unite all genetic elements, races and regions of the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent. Khan bolsters his hypothesis with copious technical linguistic examples and quotes masters of Urdu/Hindi prose and poetry of the last three centuries, showcasing the passionate expressiveness of the language. * Abdul Jamil Khan, MD, served as chairman of a teaching hospital and as a professor of pediatrics he taught infant speech development in New York. From there, his research has extended into linguistics and history. His impetus stems from his early education, as he learned six languages by 10th grade and had to face political claims regarding "Divine Arabic" and "Divine Sanskrit," and experienced the tragedies of the British division of India and its language.

Genre: Foreign Language Study / Indic Languages (fancy, right?)