So one of my perks at the job is that I get to talk to Indian people sometimes.
There is no such thing as "Indian." Dozens of regional languages are spoken in India. Some of them are sufficiently closely related that they might be called "dialects" except for political considerations. (By definition speakers of two dialects of the same language can understand each other with only a little effort.) But most are not that similar. Furthermore, these languages derive from two separate language families. Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Nepali, Romany (the language of the Gypsies) and most northwestern regional languages are in the Indic branch of the Indo-European family, closely related to the Balto-Slavic languages as well as to Farsi and Armenian. Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and many southeastern languages are in the Dravidian family, completely unrelated to the Indo-European tongues.
So if you ask an Indian how to say something, make sure you ask him to say it in Hindi, because (second only to English), that is the one language that is spoken (or at least understood) as a second language by a large number of people from all over the country.
it just does not sound like indian language to me
All Indian languages do not sound alike. Look at how different French sounds from Spanish, or German from English, even though both pairs are very closely related.
Namaste or Namashkar [formal] = welcome, hello, how de do.
Doesn't
namaste mean literally "I bow to you" in Sanskrit, and isn't it customarily said with the palms together in a cursory bowing gesture?
In America I find that most Indian men appreciate having that said to them and it will increase your respect. Women, on the other hand, usually giggle when I say it.
I recounted this experience on another thread a couple of years ago. I was riding the Washington subway late at night when the night-shift workers were going home. There were quite a few Indian men in my car, which is not unusual at any hour. A young American fellow was talking to a couple of them, telling them all of the interesting words he had once learned from an Indian friend. The words of course were crude and I could see the Indians cringing, but he didn't notice. (Take a hint, everybody: the absolute worst thing you can do in the eyes of a foreign people is to learn their profanity first.)
I innocently asked him if he knew a standard greeting and he admitted that he didn't. I said, "In that case, there's only one word you really need to know:
Namaste."
Every Indian man in the car bowed his head, put his palms together, and said softly,
Namaste. The kid looked up at me and said, "Gosh, thanks, mister." One small step for international peace and understanding.
Shukriya [Urdu] . . . . = Thank you. note how similar Shukriya is to the Arabic Shukran [casual] or Ashkirk [formal] which also means Thank you.
Every language adopts a great many words from the formal language of its community's dominant religion. English is full of old Latin words because England was a Catholic country until the Reformation. Pakistan is a Muslim country so Urdu is full of Arabic words--as are Farsi, Turkish, Albanian, Malay, etc. In fact linguists regard Hindi and Urdu as two dialects of one language; they are only regarded commonly as separate languages for political reasons. Speakers of Hindi and Urdu can understand each other with about as much difficulty as a Brummy and an Alabaman, or a Dutchman and a Fleming, or a Serb and a Croat. Other than accent, the main difference is the assimilation of Arabic words into Urdu.
Greetings in particular are often adopted from foreign languages for reasons that are difficult to track. The Swedes say
Adjö for "goodbye," which is French
Adieu. The Bulgarians use French
Merci for "Thank you." In America (and perhaps England), Italian
Ciao is often used for "Goodbye," and in the Southwest we often say Spanish
Gracias for "Thank you."
"Hello" is English, but variants of it are common greetings in many countries.
