youtube: a [white] american speaking effluent Urdu I'm curious what Urdu speakers here (I'm not one) think of John Henson's accent. I'm also curious what music (lyrics) would be best for learning a good elementary urdu vocabulary. I believe that with the right choices, it's possible to become conversational in any language by learning a dozen (or so) carefully-selected songs. If there is not a prior thread on the subject, I might like to discuss the idea that even a single song could teach basic language facility. Songs evoke stories which evoke multi-sensory memories, which anchors new language very effectively (in my experience). We could experiment with this (in an appropriate thread) by writing an efficient set of lyrics (in English most likely) that contain a story arc, vivid imagery, and a basic conversational vocabulary. The theory is that learning the Conversational Song would be equivalent to a year's effort in traditional language training. I think rhyme, meter, and linguistic DNA all enhance the neurodynamics of language learning- so, every language's ideal Conversational Facility Song would be quite unique. Another way to test my theory is to teach me Urdu in 20 songs. I'm not consciously aware (presently) of a single Urdu word. There is also a theatrical entrance: A play could be carefully written so that by studying the lines as an actor, the actor would become a conversational speaker of that language. I believe that there is a power in easily-recalled visualization that can accelerate language learning. With practice, it may be possible for many people (especially those raised multilingual) to add new languages with far less time and effort than we have been educated or programmed to expect.
Urdu itself is a bastardised tongue, a syncretism of the Persian, Arabic, Turkic, Sanskrit and Hindi. Its a language born like Yiddish, it represents the assimilation of Indo-Turkic-Persian cultures at their ascendancy. To learn Urdu is to imbibe a culture, to learn a tahzeeb [a word meaning education or sophistication or culture]. Urdu is the language of poets, of courts and courtesans; it is an emotive and hence excessive language, with meaning in minutae. Like Arabic, it has shades of fineness in articulation, like Persian, an arrogance of pedantry, like Sanskrit, the weight of history and civilisation. Learning Urdu by learning poetry or song is probably your best bet. Its a language of allegory and hyperbole and music is the best way to tame that beast. Lets try it. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I'll post my favourite Urdu song. It is relatively "easy" Urdu [classical Urdu is an exercise in glottal aerobics] This is a ghazal by Ahmed Faraz; its called Ranjish hi sahi [Let it be anguish] where Ranjish is anguish PS the translation is my own, is rough since urdu is not easily translated and hence all mistakes in meaning are my own Video for pronunciation here in traditional ghazal form by Mehdi Hassan Ranjish hi sahi, dil hi dukhane ke liye aa Aa phir se, mujhe chhod ke jaane ke liye aa Let it be anguish, if only to hurt my heart To leave me once again, come back to me Pehle se marasim na sahi, phir bhi kabhi to Rasm-o-rahe duniya hi nibhane ke liye aa Although our relationship is not the same, but still To fulfil the rituals of society, come back to me Kis kis ko batayenge judaai ka sabab hum Tu mujh se khafa hai to zamaane ke liye aa To how many will we explain, the reasons for our separation If you hate me, then for the sake of the world [to keep up appearances], come back to me Kuch to mere pindaar-e-mohabbat ka bharam rakh Tu bhi to kabhi mujh ko manaane ke liye aa To keep intact the illusion of my pride in our love Just sometimes, to woo me, come back to me Ek umr se hoon lazzat-e-girya se bhi mehroom Ay rahat-e-jaan mujh ko rulane ke liye aa Since an age I am bereft of the pleasures of grief O peace of my heart, to make me cry, come back to me Also Americans speaking Urdu is not as unusual as you seem to think. I've seen Tom Alter doing it all my life Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Here he is playing Maulana Azad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP6jcs5mNjM edit: Just to give you an idea of how someone else may translate the same song: It's okay if you hanker to grieve me please return to me! even though you're determined to leave me please return to me! hey! the pride of adoring you merits its due respect! to renew me why not deceive me? please return to me! the life we share may look different yet every now & then so that others might blindly believe me please return to me O who could unravel the reasons behind our estrangement? to wax mannerly when you would peeve me please return to me too long have I missed the delight of your furious moods! so that heart-broken tears may relieve me please return to me in hearts prone to illusions of joy doesn't hope flicker on? for the candle unsnuffed in naive me please return to me from a comment here http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474976769691 If you notice, the order of the couplets may not be the same. Thats fine, except for the initial couplet, the others can be shifted around in order. The initial one is maintained first for the purpose of identification of the ghazal.
And since you got me all worked up about the topic Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!, here is another one of my favourites: This is in the format of a nazm. It is called Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaaye to Kya hai? [What if you did gain the world?]. It is written by Sahir Ludhianvi for the film Pyaasa [Thirsty ] Video for pronounciation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yhdnIEQAgc Yeh Mehlon, Yeh Takhton, Yeh Taajon Ki Duniya, Yeh Insaan Ke Dushman Samaajon Ki Duniya, Yeh Daulat Ke Bhookhey Rawajon Ki Duniya, Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye To Kya Hai. This world of castles, thrones, mausoleums This world of anti-human societies This world of greedy, grasping rituals What if you did gain this world? Har Ek Jism Ghayal, Har Ek Rooh Pyaasi, Nigahon Mein Uljhan, Dilon Mein Udaasi, Yeh Duniya Hai Ya Aalam-e-Badhawasi, Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye To Kya Hai. Every body wounded, every soul thirsty Eyes filled with conflict, hearts filled with sadness Is this a world or just an atmosphere of confusion [hard to translate alam-e-badhawasi, think of it as smoke and mirrors?] What if you did gain this world? Yahaan Ek Khilona Hai Insaan Ki Hasti, Yeh Basti Hai Murda Paraston Ki Basti, Yahaan Par To Jeevan Se Hai Maut Sasti, Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye To Kya Hai. Here the state of humanity is a toy Here the dead are worshipped Here death is cheaper than life What if you did gain this world? Jawaani Bhatakti Hai Badakaar Ban Kar, Jawaan Jism Sajtey Hain Bazaar Ban Kar, Yahaan Pyaar Hota Hai Byopaar Ban Kar, Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye To Kya Hai. Youth roams around as a curse Young bodies are sold in the markets Here love is conducted as a transaction What if you did gain this world? Yeh Duniya Jahaan Aadmi Kuch Nahi Hai, Wafa Kuch Nahi, Dosti Kuch Nahi Hai, Yahaan Pyaar Ki Qadr Hi Kuch Nahi Hai, Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye To Kya Hai. This world where man is nothing Where fidelity is nothing, friendship is nothing Where love has no value What if you did gain this world? Jala Do Isey, Phoonk Dalo Yeh Duniya. Mere Saamne Se Hata Lo Yeh Duniya, Tumhari Hai Tum Hi Sambhalo Yeh Duniya, Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye To Kya Hai? Burn it down, destroy this world Remove it from before my eyes Its yours, this world, you keep it What if you did gain this world? ---------------------------------------- One interesting point about Urdu tehzeeb is that it automatically forces you to be polite. It is hard to be impolite in Urdu and hence speaking Urdu itself is a form of sophistication. You have to add words from other languages to be crass. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Thanks, Sam. Now I have 2 assignments. I'll learn these two songs (1 at a time) and then try and string together my own phrases in Urdu. At least I can ponder my theory, and yeh Duniya Hai Ya Aalam-e-Badhawasi from a new urdu persona. This is why there can be no mistakes when you take the time to translate for us here, Sam. Tum ajeeb ho. Where there is difficulty only means you possess valuable insight not found in canned or amatuerish translations. To meet your generous challenge, I have to form a generalized notion of how a mostly-imagined Pakistani or Indian person might experience the songs, and recite them from that assumed composite persona; feeling the song and expressing it out, untranslated in Urdu. This is another key element: NO mental translation while emoting the recital. Mental translation during recital is a serious impediment to what I will be trying to learn: Thinking, hearing, and speaking in Urdu. Learning a new language this way requires discarding what is commonly taught about language learning, to borrow instead from what people develop in learning to perform songs, recite poetry, or act in a movie or play, in a new language, and in public. Some people are uncomfortable with this. I am a little bit, but I remember that the discomfort pales in comparison to the feeling of primal discovery, to be able to express ones thoughts in a new language. It's a blast from our most formative pasts, for anyone who uncovers the amazement and thrill. It also reminds us vividly how we are not alone, in terms of deep feelings. Discovering we share that, and and sharing the discovery, our shared world can be reborn at our (shared, we discover) bidding. I think part of the challenge here will be submitting (this is not without some "stage fright" on my part) audio recitation files, and when I get to that point I hope you (Sam or any good Urdu speakers) will critique and correct my pronunciation. A little bit off-track- another of "my" theories (maybe someone else has already proven these AFAIK): To learn a new accent, first learn to imitate and nearly master the accent being learned, but in one's native language. It's silly but it trains /exercises how to posture the mouth for every vowel, consonant, and how to use tone, cadence, etc. Although I'll never be able to sing any high contralto female bits, I intend to record myself singing in Urdu, and post it here. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Don't worry, I'm not completely tone-deaf.
Okay, just for clarity, both of the "accents" above are slightly different in their origin. Can you tell the difference? Urdu itself is accented geograhically like most languages, there are subtle differences in usage that distinguish one from the other, although, in the case of Deccani Urdu, the distinction is so marked as to be nearly incomprehensible to the classical Urdu speaker. Deccani Urdu is concentrated in Hyderabad, India and has been made famous by its intense focus on comedy. Something about Deccani Urdu makes it irrepressibly unsophisticated and prone to humour. Its like the Southern blond version of classical Urdu. People laugh just listening to the accent. A relatively "easy" rendering of Deccani Urdu in a non-comedy setting Roz lad lad ko jaan kha kha ko Accha jungle main so gaye Hakum Everyday fighting fighting, eating eating my life Now his Majesty sleeps nicely in the jungle Mundi kaati ko roz marna tha Leko mutthi main jaan baithi hai Daily dying by beheadings Now she sits with life in her fist Aisa marna bhi kaisa marna ji Ghar mein beti jawaan baithi hai What is the point of such dying When an unmarried daughter is still sitting at home? Kitte logaan ke pavaan pad pad ko Ghar se mayyat ko main uthaee hoon After much pleading and begging I [female] carried his casket from home Jeena marna tumhara kharze ka Aaj pura udhar layee hoon Your life and death may have been in debt But today I paid it all in credit Video here You'll notice its not as straightforward as classical ghazals are. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! These are called as ashars, which probably translates to couplets. The plural is shairi, or Poetry.
Yes, that will be the best way to do it. I think your background in Arabic will help, the characters are the same, although the grammar is different. The emphasis on feeling is pretty similar. I think Urdu is probably more like German than French in grammar but I don't know enough German to be sure. If you would like me to expand on some term which seems discordant to you, let me know and I will try to explain the feeling behind it. Urdu, as you have rightly guessed, is ALL about feelings.
That's why we're so afraid of you people over here. You want me to talk about my feelings? I'd rather feel and express someone else's. Which always gives me deja vu (at the same time as not believing in car nations).
Well sometimes, listening to and deciphering other peoples feelings can put you in touch with your own. Sentimentality is catching. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Sure, why not complicate matters. good ideaPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image! what now.. no that's helpful, and makes things less complicated. OK I'll come back when I can udder some Urdu.
Did I mention how much the CIA would pay for our course? And we would get agents in touch with their feelings, and everybody wins. & enough of this boring English chatting, I have some music to attend to for a while.
Well I tried to capture the tone of the lover as well as the meaning of the words. The other translation sounds like a piteous wail, while the song itself is one where, while obviously heartsick over the separation, the lover is offering alternatives to himself as an excuse for his estranged love to return. It is devoid of emphasis on me, mine, my feelings. Even the grief that comes from unrequited love is painted as a solace that comes from much crying.
That doesn't sound like a whole lotta fun. I wasn't even 20 when I decided to never get my "heart" "broken" again. But if I had to wail pitifully like a wretched nobody yodelling an eastern scale in falsetto in public all just to learn Urdu, well it would be a small price to pay; an expendable biopsy of ego.
Well you have to reconfigure your priorities. Haven't you read the Rubaiyat of Khayyam? I would tell you to read Ghalib on the ecstasy of pain in love, but...baby steps.
Yes. One strange dream at a time... "Rubaiyat of Khayyam?" Yes of course, but probably 25 (!) years ago.
Interesting point of view. All the other Indians I know are Hindu rather than Muslim. They say that Hindi and Urdu are merely two dialects of the same language and they have very little trouble understanding Urdu. Of course they don't get into religious topics, which is surely where many of the foreign words are concentrated. If linguists had their way, the definition of dialects would be "mutually comprehensible variants of a single language." But cultural and political pressure overrides our scholarship. The people of Flanders insist that Flemish is not a dialect of Dutch, and the people of South Africa say the same about Afrikaans. Czechs and Slovaks can understand each other with only a little effort, as can Danes and Swedes, Spaniards and Catalonians, Catalonians and Portuguese. I've been told that the same is true of several other languages of India besides Hindi and Urdu. Of course even our definition runs into problems because of the phenomenon of the dialect continuum. As you travel west from Berlin, you encounter a regional dialect that is understandable by Berliners, then one that is understandable by the people of that second region, and so forth... all the way to Holland! But the people at either end of that spectrum can't understand each other, so Dutch and German are universally regarded as distinct languages. Not to disagree, but something very similar can be said about almost any language with a large community of speakers. The more dissimilar and unrelated it is to your own language, the more exotic and paradigm-challenging it will seem. The great poets, storytellers, philosophers, orators and songwriters in any language will take your breath away; and the common people whose aptitudes and interests lie in some other part of their life than communication will not. Chinese, Japanese, Latin, Greek, German, French, Italian, Russian--some of the most highly regarded writings on Earth are in those languages. In the last 500 years English has been elevated to that status, and in my lifetime I've seen Spanish added to the list. Given enough time and social stability, every language eventually reflects the themes, endeavors, yearnings and problems of its speakers. Study an African, Australian or Native American language and you'll be blown away by their completely different perspective on the universe and the beauty they observe in that universe that we are not even aware of. But the vectors go in opposite directions. Urdu started as the native, vernacular language of the people of northern Hindustan, and it borrowed heavily from the languages of the foreigners who conquered its speakers politically and religiously. Yiddish, on the other hand, started out as German, a foreign language adopted by the Jews in Europe that completely displaced Aramaic, their own vernacular. To German they added elements from their own culture, expressed in their own ancient tongue, Hebrew, which they continued to keep alive only as a stilted liturgical language. The mechanism is almost completely reversed. Then I guess the 1960s are really over. Or maybe you kids just don't take enough drugs.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Fraguel: "Given enough time and social stability, every language eventually reflects the themes, endeavors, yearnings and problems of its speakers. Study an African, Australian or Native American language and you'll be blown away by their completely different perspective on the universe and the beauty they observe in that universe that we are not even aware of." Is it possible that there is something like a DNA is wound up in all language? That the soundscapes we use to evoke thoughts and images encode more than their face meaning; sound-associations have another encoded visceral layer that can be glimpsed, or even made into a symphonic part of the story. Or, the short-cuts formed between sound and thought all combine to form a complex neural reproduction that thinks partially in parallel, with great variation that may correlate or reveal in a fractal sort of way, a different (but shared through language) window of human perception. I'm wondering if languages are comingling thoughforms, scaffolds for worldviews that may be described and compared. Is such a thing considered in linguistics? ------------ Aside notes: I must "prove Sam wrong" in an unrelated thread, and also get my microphone drivers working (computer is a work in progress) first. Days may pass without a sound here. For audiophiles' audio files, what format do people prefer in a posted link? A .wav file to download? a link to youtube?
Just an update on the project: I've been mostly neglecting this, but getting my thoughts around the English translation- of the first poem that is. I have only gotten a sense of the sounds and flow listening to a couple of versions on youtube. Now I have to learn the English from Sam's translation sufficiently to convert and play back (mentally) a simple series of language-less images and emotions. Sometimes I wish she'd just posted something simpler like the Tata Nano Owner's Manual. Must a savage learn English quothing Shakespeare? That is the question. I'm hoping for something like "Singhing in the Rain", but I haven't gotten inside this enough to know if there's a glorious feeling to be had there, or it's just fancy romantic talk that could have been useful back in the good old colonial days. What I'm trying to picture (getting back to speaking Urdu for a song) involves constructing a fairly elaborate mental "stage" for context- I think this is the "fractal" secret of this. We can construct elaborate little worlds, where we are comfortable in knowing how to express every aspect of it, and summon these worlds (if we construct them deliberately and well) with pleasure and ease. Once we can access an anchored sphere of language we have full, easy recall of everything in these spheres, that we can use in any context. I think poetry and music help us to pack up stories and emotions, like compressed files. When you have a well-visualized compressed worldlet ready for first recalls, you may not be ready to crawl (or grandly enter) into it, not even privately. Constructing a small sphere of words and sounds is enough work at first. We can come back later, in little steps, or struts, or swooping fly-bys. The point is to build these little linguistic worlds, and then practice entering into song-bubbles to improvise (use a new language creatively and expressively). Bringing courage, knowing these things start out comically clumsy. This is also about courage, and we can often find better things to do than be brave. I don't have a microphone hooked up yet, but I should be speaking basic conversational (if silly) Urdu in a few days inshallah.
Would you like a simpler song? Here is one very simple song: its a qawwali format [kinda like rock music in urdu] from the film Waqt [time] [it has a passable translation although Zohra jabeen literally means Venus star] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nvF0KV-DVI No thats not how it works, the "problem" if one were to describe it as such is that Urdu emerged in the same location [North India] where Hindi is the most widely spoken language. It would be hard to delineate where Hindi begins and Urdu ends, script aside. An Urdu speaker would have little difficulty in understanding Hindi, since they are both from the same region. A natural consequence of this has been that speakers of both languages mix them up, If we were to get really technical and deep about it, a classical Hindi speaker could no more understand a classical Urdu speaker than vice versa. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! classical Urdu for welcome: Adaab arz hai [greetings to you] classical Hindi for welcome: namaste [welcome] Hindi for youth :yauvan Urdu for youth: Jawani But since both are from the same place they know exactly what the other means. Also I am not certain you have the direction of Urdu right, I think it was developed by the Turkic-Persians who attempted to include Hindi into their speech. But I am massively ignorant on the subject
