The title of this module is misleading and inadequate, but it is also the best I can come up with. The following modules talk about the ways in which Urdu builds vocabulary from verbs and using suffixes that have come into Urdu through Prakrit. What should this register of Urdu be called? It certainly is not Arabic or Persian. Many of the words in this register come from Prakrit and are thus Indic and related to Sanskrit, but it would be misleading to label them as tatsama, since they are not, in fact, Sanskrit in a changed form, nor, in most cases, are they desī words not related to Sanskrit. We can’t call them “Indic vernacular,” because that casts too broad a net. These are word forms in many cases specific to Urdu (though many have parallels in other vernacular Indian languages). A very good solution would be simply to call the section “Urdu Word Building.” But this also presents a problem, since it implies that the patterns of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit-Prakrit word building surveyed elsewhere are somehow different from Urdu word building. That would be incorrect, since we are using the word “Urdu” to describe the whole of the language, just as we subsume French, German, and Latin words building under the umbrella category “English” when talking about English vocabulary, and we might turn to Latin terms like “Anglican” to describe those elements that distinguish vernacular English word building patterns from its Germanic and Latinate cousins.
For these reasons, I have called this section “Hindi Word Building in Urdu.” The word “Hindi” is not used here in the narrow sense of Urdu’s sister language written in the Devanagari script, but in its older and broader sense of “Indic language” and one of the classical names of Urdu. A second reason to use this name is that these forms are all shared with, and identical in, Modern Standard Hindi. The title is thus intended to demonstrate the close relationship between, and indistinguishability of, these two languages.
