EVOLUTION OF DIALECT AND SCRIPT: CASE STUDY OF URDU
Abstract
In India, Urdu ghazals are published in Dēvanāgarī, transliterated from Perso-Arabic nastaliq script. This paper studies the accuracy of these transliterations, by comparing 152 poems (2734 lines) from seven poets, including Jaipur-based Urdu poet Parsā Kaūsarī Jaipūri (1922-1999) whose hitherto unknown Urdu manuscript containing his Collected Poems is introduced and described. Word-by-word comparison detected that in 113 out of 2734 lines the original and transliterated texts slightly differed. As the Hindi and Urdu languages are almost identical in their vocabulary and grammar, rewriting an Urdu nasta‘lÊq text in to Dēvanāgarī is a special case of domestication , that is a strategy of making the target text closely conform to the pronunciation, orthography and grammar of the Hindi language. For the lay reader such “Urdu-in-Dēvanāgarī” reproductions of the Urdu ghazals are useful, satisfactory and preserve their esthetic value, but to avoid loss of information from the source text, it is recommended that definitive, scientific editions of Urdu ghazals should always be published in both scripts en face, with the rare Urdu words explained in footnotes.