Brief Guide To The Development Of The Arabic Script

Brief Guide To The Development Of The Arabic Script

This post is intended as a very brief guide to the development of the modern Arabic script and derived scripts (Persian /Urdu/Sindhi/Balochi/Afghani/Turkic and their friends). The history of the development of the Arabic script proper is to an extent a history of Quranic orthography ie the way the Quran is written out in the Arabic script. I have tried to steer clear of any historical and hagiographical controversies and presented only the bare minimum of information needed to get a clear grasp of the journey of the Arabic script from its embryonic stage to maturity. I hope this will serve as an introduction to my next post which will be on the different styles of Arabic calligraphy.

Super Short History of Arabic's Ancestors

Arabic is a Semitic language and all Semitic scripts (not languages) are based on the proto-Canaanite script. It is agreed that Proto-Canaanite is a child of Egyptian Hieroglyphs  with a hint of Akkadian DNA (completely different from Hieroglyphs). The pictographic Egyptian Hieroglyphs become proto-Canaanite Acrophones, symbols in which the symbol represents only the first sound of the word depicted by the same symbol in Egyptian Hieroglyphs rather than the whole word itself, eg. the hut Hieroglyph symbol depicted the word "beyt" (house) in totality but actually just stood for only the "b" sound of "beyt" in the Acrophonic proto-Canaanite script.

  Source - Writing Systems, ALinguistic Approach by Henry Rogers

 

In the Semitic language, tree over time, the Proto-Canaanite script mothered the Phoenician script which begot the Aramaic script which birthed the Nabataean script which bore the Arabic script. It is very important to note that the Nabataean script used only 22 consonants and early Arabic had to make do with these 22 symbols for its own repertoire of 28 consonants. This 22 vs 28 difference will be significant later. Another feature of almost all of these Semitic scripts was that they did not depicts vowels (long or short), something of a family trait because the Egyptian Hieroglyphs omit vowels too; this also should be kept in mind for later on.

This would also be a good place to mention that the Greek, Roman and many Indian scripts (and their spawns) are also derivatives of the proto-Canaanite script. So Arabic and Devanagari are distant cousins and most of the things mentioned so far apply to the Indic/Greek/Roman scripts as well.

 

 

Source - Writing Systems, ALinguistic Approach by Henry Rogers

Earliest Arabic Script

Now let's come to the Arabic script itself. As of now, the first definitive example of what can be called as Arabic script is a rock engraving, an epitaph of a certain Mrs Raqush, found in Mada'in Saleh (Saudi Arabia) dated to about 267AD. Some scholars believe this script to be something in between Nabataean and Arabic and others unequivocally classify it as Arabic script. This inscription does have some words in the Thamud scripts as well. However do not assume that this is the oldest inscription in Arabic language. Many, much older, Arabic language samples have been found, albeit written/engraved in non-Arabic scripts such as pre-Islamic Arabic poetry written in Nabataean, Aramaic, Thamudic, Epigraphic South Arabian scripts etc.

 

The famous Raqush inscription to the left and modern Arabic copy/interpretation to the right. Can you make out any of the words in the original? Without the aid of the modern copy I can barely recognize the odd  عhere and the odd ل  there and one  حand a  فيsomewhere and that's all conjecture too. The second word in the second line is Raqoosh. Of course I have forgotten most of my Arabic anyway. But this must have been perfectly legible to the people it was meant for.

Source - http://www.islamic-awareness.org/History/Islam/Inscriptions/raqush.html

For a partial list of Nabataean and the very early Arabic script samples check out http://www.islamic-awareness.org/History/Islam/Inscriptions/

Revelation Era

Jumping forward three and a half centuries after the demise of Mrs Raqush we come to the era of the Quranic revelations (610-632AD). By this time the Arabic script had been modified a lot more from the semi-Nabataen form and had come much closer to its final form. The initial Meccan utterances in the Quraishi dialect of Arabic by Prophet Muhammad were shorter and quickly committed to memory by the small but fast expanding group of Muslims. However by the time the Prophet emigrated to Medina the revealed verses became much longer as did the size of the Muslim community. Now secretaries started recording these longer Arabic verses on whatever medium was ready at hand at the moment of revelation, be it animal hide, parchment, rocks, leaves or bones etc. These written records were created purely as memory aids and not as written scripture. According to Kees Versteegh, this shift from an purely oral Meccan record of the divine words to a partially written Medinan record is attested to in the Quran itself, through the shift in the usage of the word Quran (recite this), referring to the sacred revelations in the earlier verses to the word Kitaab (book), referring to the sacred revelations in the later verses. However the key thing to remember here is that despite the growing importance of a written record, for the Quranic verses as well as the pre and post Islamic Arabic poetry these written records were still secondary to the primary method of preserving something which was to memorize it (except in the case of commercial transactions and war treaties). This tradition of oral recitation and transmission is quite well entrenched in most Semitic cultures and religions so much so that to this day those who commit the Quran to memory are bestowed the title of "Haafiz" which means the preserver/protector, one who preserves the sacred text in his/her heart. Hence even till the a few years after the death of Prophet Muhammad (632AD) the written records were considered secondary as there were thousands of "reciters" who knew the Quran by heart and had learnt it from the Prophet's own mouth.

 

Supposed letter dictated by Prophet Muhammad to a scribe and then dispatched to the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, circa 630AD. Regardless of the authenticity, if this text is indeed from around 630-650AD it clearly shows the strong departure of the Arabic script from its Nabataean sandbox-days as depicted in the Raqush engraving. I can easily make out quite a few letters (and words!) of this text.

Source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Muhammad-Letter-To-Heraclius.jpg

Although the scripts used in the 5th-8th Centuries were very different from the one given below, this table gives an idea of what the shapes of the different Arabic letters were at this time, which sounds they represented and how common shapes were used for very different sounds. One can see that there are no dots, diacritical marks, above any of the letters.

 

As noted in the table given above:

The sounds b/t/th were represented by the same symbol.

The sounds j/H/kh were represented by the same symbol.

The sounds d/dh were represented by the same symbol.

The sounds s/sh were represented by the same symbol.

The sounds ṣ / ḓ were represented by the same symbol.

The sounds ṭ / ẓ were represented by the same symbol.

The sounds r/z were represented by the same symbol.

The sounds `/gh were represented by the same symbol.

 

Early Caliphate Era - The Rashidun

In less than 15 years of the death of the Prophet certain developments compelled his successors, the Caliphs, to take make changes in the written Quran and the Arabic script. First, many of the reciters died in battles against the apostates, the Romans and the Persians. A famous, oft quoted, example is of the half a thousand reciters who died at the Battle of Yamama in  632AD; an event which so perturbed the pious Uthman that he convinced the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, to overcome "the loss of much of the Quran" by having it compiled into a book. Second, the increasing number of non-Arab converts to Islam, who were new to the Arabic language and sounds, often incorrectly recited the Quranic verses. Finally, many of the Muslims started to disagree amongst each other on the pronunciation and meaning of some words as the Prophet had clearly declared that there were seven different, perfectly equal, readings of the Quran, based upon the different urban and Bedouin dialects of Arabic in his time. When Uthman became the third Caliph (644-652AD) he decided to bring an end to the worry of "forgetting the Quran" and also to the conflicts caused by the variant readings by undertaking a codification of the Quran. He collected all the written sheets of Quran from the Prophet's time, had them collated them into one definitive edition and then returned the sheets to Hafsa, the widow of the Prophet from whom he had taken them in the first place . For some reasons there are no extant samples of the original written records of the Quranic revelations made by the secretaries of Prophet Muhammad. This "final" version was sent to every province of the geometrically expanding Islamic empire as the authorized Quran and all non-compliant written variants were destroyed by state officials. Some variants were concealed but ultimately lost to the hands of man or of time.

Umayyad and Very Early Abbasid Caliphate Eras

However, soon two characteristics which the Arabic script had inherited from Nabataean and had not caused any problems before now returned to haunt the Arabic script's efficacy in a vast and diverse empire. Quranic orthography still employed 22 symbols to depict its 28 consonant sounds and it did still did not depict vowels in writing. This negated any real codification and unification efforts which the Caliph Umar had hoped to achieve with his authoritative final version of the Quran.

1.The first characteristic of using 22 symbols to depict 28 sounds caused a problem in identifying the correct letters. The examples below illustrates the problem. Without diacritical points to identify which of the phonemes (sounds) is being referred to, only reference to context or external guidance can help shed some light on the correct word which is implied by the author of the text.

 

The problems caused by misreading of Bs for Ts and Rs for Zs and so forth had reached an inflection point and something had to be done to correct the situation. Some accounts would have us believe that under the aegis of the Umayyad governor Hajjaj ibn Yusuf  (d.714AD), the diacritical points were innovated and adopted for use in the Quranic texts in order to remove the ambiguity in reading. However the actual historical evidence proves these accounts are largely apocryphal. As of now, the oldest usage of such diacritical points has been found on a papyrus called Perf No. 558, a billingual (Greek and Arabic) advance tax receipt which dates itself to 643 AD, a decade an a half before Hajjaj ibn Yusuf was even born. The Arabic text in this tax receipt has some letters dotted and others undotted and the dots appear to have been used in a very matter of fact way. Although Perf No. 558 has not been studied extensively, it is clear that at least 20 years after the Hejira of the Prophet, if not earlier, non-religious Arabic texts occasionally employed diacritical points to eliminate faulty reading of the text.

 Perf No 558, the oldest Arabic text which clearly shows the use of diacritical points, dated to 643AD. Source http://www.islamic-awareness.org/History/Islam/Papyri/PERF558.html

 

Based on the evidence of Perf No. 558, it can be stated that Arabic script did have diacritical points used as a tool to proper understanding of the text. The Arabic letters with the diacritical points to differentiate them from each other would have looked almost exactly like the ones used today, as shown in the table given below. The dots help, as shown in the mountain/dementia/rope example above to read  However mere availability is not the same as active usage and we know for a fact that the Arabic Qurans did not employ the diacritical points, perhaps largely to avoid any inadvertent desecration of the base text. The arrangement in the table below was made by Arabic grammarians on the basis of similarity in the shapes of the letters. More on arrangements later.

 The final Arabic alphabet. Compare with the first table above which gives the same number of sounds but with fewer letters

 2.The second characteristic of the Arabic script of not marking vowels also caused confusions, especially between verb forms which often have the same shape and letters but different short vowels and sometimes between plurals and verb forms. The example below illustrates the latter confusion.

 This vowel problem was initially overcome by the pioneer grammarian Abul Aswad AdDuali (d.688AD) at the behest of the Umayyad Caliph AbdUl Malik (d.705AD), who was also instrumental in switching the administrative language of the entire Arabian empire from a patchwork of Greek, Aramaic and Pahlavi over to Arabic after he caught a Greek scribe urinating into the ink well used to write out the official records for lack of water to prepare the ink. The solution proposed by the grammarian Abul Aswad seems to have been partially inspired by similar solutions in other Semitic script traditions: place dots around each letter to indicate short vowel sounds for that letter. Abul Aswad is also credited with inventing the symbols for the Hamza and the Khafeef vowels and the Shadda. Before, the Khafeef (absence of any vowel) and the Shadda (doubling of a consonant) were not depicted at all, hence the Khafeef and the Shadda too had to be inferred from the context of the base text. This system of Abul Aswad was further refined by the 8th Century grammarian and author of the first Arabic dictionary, Al Khalil ibn AhmedFaraaheedi (d.791AD) who replaced the dots with smaller versions of the corresponding long vowel sounds. This has been illustrated in the table below. 

Vowel Name and Sound	Abul Aswad Ad-Duali's (d.688AD) Vowel Markers	Al Khalil ibn Ahmed's (d. 791AD) Vowel Markers
Fatha - Short "a" - "Ma"	ݥ	مَ
Dhamma - Short "u" - "Mu"	م.	مُ
Kasra - Short "i" - "Mi"	ݦ	مِ
Tanwin - Short Nunation - "Dan, Dun, Din"	ڍ , د.. , ڌ	دٍ , دٌ,داً
Shadda - doubling of a consonant sound	Symbol unknown to me	ّ
Khafeef aka Sukoon - absence of any vowel sound	Symbol unknown to me	ْ , ۡ
Hamza - glottal stop	ء	ء , ؤ , ئ , أ , إ

Middle Abbasid Caliphate Era onwards

These two changes were not accepted immediately by the religious members of the Muslim community largely as a result of fear of innovating the received text of the Quran. Similar fears also dissuaded the Jews from accepting any diacritical points or matres lectionis to identify letters or vowels over the base text of the standardized Hebrew Bible until well over a thousand years after the composition of the last book of the Hebrew Bible. It took close to 250-300 years after the revelation of the Quran for the vowel markers and diacritical points to become a common place feature in Qurans. Interestingly the Jewish initiative, called the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible, and the Muslim initiative for making these changes in the Quran were both finalised around the same time, being almost contemporaneous events, within 50-75 years of each other. Further both of these sacred texts with the diacritical marks and vowel points are now the standard texts for their respective religions (though only unmarked, base text Hebrew Bibles are used for liturgy).

 Very early Kufic Arabic Quranic calligraphy from Yemen.

Shows only the base text.

No vowel markers - No diacritical points to distinguish between phonemes

 Kufic Arabic calligraphy, Surah Hujjarat, 9th Century. Text on the obverse side is visible due of inadequate thickness of the parchment.

Shows base text. Coloured vowel markers added later in Abul Aswad's style over base text in an effort to standardize the sounds.

No diacritical points to distinguish between phonemes.

 

 Later Kufic Arabic Quranic calligraphy, perhaps 10th Century.

Shows base text, vowel markers in Abul Aswad's style and diacritical points to distinguish between phonemes.

 Naskh Arabic Quranic calligraphy, Surah Fatiha, representative of all Qurans post-11th Century.

Shows base text, vowel markers in the newer Al Khalil style and diacritical points all made as part of the writing at the same time.

However by the turn of 10th-11th Century Qurans employed both diacritical points and vowel markers and from then have been mandatorily written with diacritical points and vowel marks. By this time non-Quranic Arabic texts also used the diacritical points as standard usage, though they did not use vowel markers. In non-sacred and non-school texts, the ancient Semitic habit of not marking vowels has managed to keep its hold till today. As a result only the diacritical points are marked in the majority of Arabic texts and the short vowels are left unmarked, to be guessed by reference to context. Even religious commentaries on the Quran and Hadith do not carry the short vowel markers. All other scripts based on Arabic such as Persian/Urdu/Turkic have also continued with this same tradition. Though in certain rare cases vowels are marked to clear ambiguity. The following examples will make the partial usage of vowel marks more clear.

A textbook to teach Arabic from the 1950s, employs vowel markers in every word to remove ambiguity.

 Modern printed version of the first page of the celebrated Introduction or "Muqadimah" of Ibn Khaldun's 14th century Arabic treatise on history, politics, economics and sociology. Again, barely discernable use of vowel markers

 Modern printed version of the first page of the Persian translation of Mevlana Rumi's "Fi Hi Ma Fi Hi" ( In It Is What Is In It). Notice that although most of the sentences do not have vowel marks, some sentences do. These sentences are verses from the Quran which must always be written with vowel marks.

First page of the famous turn of 20th Century Urdu novel, Umrao Jaan Ada, bereft of vowel markers but for the short vowel u in the name Umrao

 

The Arabic Alphabet

The modern standard Arabic alphabet arranged according to similarilty in shapes of the letters

 Note that many letters have different slightly different stand-alone, initial, medial and final forms. This feature is common to many Semitic scripts and seems to be an ancient feature of these scripts.

Source - http://www.importanceoflanguages.com/LearnArabic/learn-arabic-alphabet-letters/

 

Gematrical Values and Other Arrangement of the Alphabet

Along with the shapes and sounds of the Arabic letters, the numerical values of these letters are also fundamental. Many Semitic and non-Semitic alphabets assign numerological values to their letters.. Often in earlier times, the letters were used as numbers based on their numerical values in lieu of any special number symbols, until Hindu numerals (to the Arabs) were adopted by the Abbasid Caliphs in early 9th Century and then later on adopted by most of the West as Arab numerals. Hence the letter أ  was used for the value 1, the letter   ب was used for the value 2,   تfor 3, ج   for 4 and so on; these first four  letters, A-B-J-D, which correspond to values, 1-2-3-4 were together called the abjd and gave rise to the term abjd for the Arabic alphabet. The numerical arrangement of the Arabic alphabet is given below. Other Semitic scripts also follow this same numerical system. The numerical values of letters are used for various purposes such as religious symbolism, magic and divination, astrology and occult and even for seeking divine patterns. The table below shows the numerical values and arrangements of the letters.

Source - http://www.quranwonders.com/images/Gommal.png

 The arrangement of Arabic letters into numbers is called Taarikh  تاريخor Chronogram and the most famous chronogram in Arabic is undoubtedly the number 786 which is derived as follows:

بسم لله - bism illah - 2+60+40   +   1+30+30+5 = 168

الرّحمن - a(l) rrahman - 1+30+200+8+40+50 = 329

الرّحيم - a(l) rraheem - 1+30+200+8+10+40 = 289

168+329+289 = 786

The title of one of my favourite books, Bagh - o - Bahar is also a chronogram which gives the value 1217AH corresponding to 1802AD, the year in which the book was written. Chronograms have been used for thousands of years and can sneak up on you quite suddenly, which is why they are so much fun!

We have already noted two arrangements of the Arabic alphabet: the one arranged according to similarity in the shapes of the letters and the other based on the numerical values of the letters. A third arrangement of the Arabic alphabet was created by the grammarian Al Khalil ibn Ahmed Faraaheedi (d.791AD), whom we have already encountered  as the one who perfected the vowel marker system. Al Khalil Faraaheedi wrote the first dictionary of Arabic, Kitaab al Ayn, in which he arranged the letters neither according to their shapes nor according to their values but according to where their sound originates in the mouth. His dictionary starts with Ayn  عas the first letter because it is voiced from the lowest point in the throat and moving upwards and outwards in the mouth, ends with Meem  مas the last letter because it is voiced from the tip of the lips. Because the first letter in this dictionary is Ayn it is called Kitaab al Ayn.

These three arrangements of the Arabic alphabet are not exhaustive.

Persian, Urdu, Turkic, Malay and Allied Scripts

Persian, Urdu, Turkic, Malay use the Arabic script for their own sounds by mapping the Arabic letters onto similar sounds from their alphabet. However in the case of each of these languages their sound space is much larger than the one catered to by the 28 Arabic letters and this has neccesitated the innovation of new shapes from with the 28 letter repertoire in each of these languages.

Additional letters can be spotted in the alphabet tables given below:

 Persian / Daari alphabet

Urdu alphabet

Ottoman Turkish alphabet

Sindhi alphabet

Jawi / Malay alphabet

 I hope this post has helped you to understand the basics of the development of the Arabic script and will point you in the right direction.

 To Know More About:

Arabic script and learning to write Arabic
Wikipedia's page on the history of the Arabic script
Guidedways's has a decent introductary course to learn the script
Youtube video tutorial


Numerology/Gematrical values
One of my favourite Urdu luminaries, Prof Frances Pritchett, talks about Chronograms
Wikipedia on Arabic gematrical values
Wikipedia on Hebrew gematrical values



Writing Systems, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Proto-Cannanite
Writing Systems, A Linguistic Approach by Henry Rogers
Writing Sytems of the World by Florian Coulmas


Others
The phenomenal work by Kees Versteegh on the development of the Arabic language
Alan Jones talks about the significance of papyrus Perf No 558
Wikipedia on the history of the Quran, including its compilation

William Jones aka Yunis Uksfardi, Oxford and Persian

William Jones urf Yunis Uksfardi, Oxford and the Persian Language

Most people know of William Jones' superhyperparanormal command of scores of languages, precocious childhood and ever more prodigious adulthood. Most also know that he was the founding father of the famous Asiatic Society of Bengal. However, few are aware that William Jones also went around by the nom de plume Yunis Uksfardi.

In 1771 William Jones wrote a book on Persian Grammar. On the inner title page of this Persian Grammar, William Jones wrote his name in Persian text as Yunis Uksfardi. The sheer sense of wow which I got the first time I encountered this Persian rendition of William Jones' name can not be described. I think it was akin to suddenly finding a small fantastic treasure buried under one's bed. 

Uksfardi obviously comes from Oxford and refers, perhaps, to the deep sense of attachment that William Jones may have had for the University of Oxford. He seemed to treasure his association with the University of Oxford so much that he selected Oxford rather than his place of birth, Westminster, as his last name in Persian. Perhaps he took up Uksfardi as the second part of his pen name because it was at Oxford that he learnt Arabic and then Persian under the tutelage of a Syrian native, Mirza of Aleppo, whom William Jones chanced upon in London and requested him to help him learn these tongues. William Jones was very highly regarded at Oxford and won quite a few accolades during his time there. In 1780 he even contested in the Parliament for the seat from Oxford.

Why did William Jones choose Yunis as his first name though? Some are of the opinion that Jones is a Welsh contraction of John (or of son of John). In this case William Jones had two choices for rendering John into Persian (Arabic):

Youhanna - the Christian Arab version of the name John

Yahya - the Islamic Arab version of the name John 

He swept aside both options in favour of Yunis. There has to be a reason for this choice.

But why Yunis, why?

One gets an idea of William Jones' inclination towards the re-discovery of Ancient Oriental knowledge from the (celebrated) Preface to his Grammar of the Persian Language. The Preface is truly an introduction to the Persian language as it goes into the details of describing the Persian language as well as of the development of the language. He extols the virtues of Oriental knowledge and also denies any validity of the various excuses the British of his time used to make for not showing an interest in Persian culture; ranging from being too busy to waste time on Persian to Persian being a language of barbarians and or of believers in Mahomet,  to everything else in between. Bear in mind that in 1771, warfare between the fractious European powers and the Ottoman Empire was still very common indeed and also that European imperialism was now taking firm shape. William Jones cites Voltaire's unbridled appreciation of Persian literature in support of his ideas. He goes on to explain how Persian has started becoming very important for the British in India for good governance and politics as all court correspondence, firmans and petitions are in Persian and every British official in the Indian courts must be able to hold his own when it comes to reading and writing in proper Persian without resorting to Munshis. This book on Persian Grammar is clearly targeted at the British officials in India. I think I remember reading somewhere that William Jones wrote this book at the request of a director of the East India Company who wanted a Persian manual for the EIC officers. Earlier they had to rely solely on the Indian Munshis for learning Persian and other Indian languages. However, soon after, the British realised the importance of employing local dialects rather than Persian or Sanskrit while conversing with the commoners. To this end, Fort William College was established in Calcutta at the turn of the 19th century. The British of course, sounded the death knell for Persian in India when they outlawed its use as an official language of British India around half a century after the publication of the first edition of William Jones' Persian Grammar.

In his Preface, William Jones laments the fact that he does not have enough time to write an accompanying history of Persian literature. William Jones, of course had earlier already translated many books on Persian history from Persian into European languages. Perhaps in the title pages of these texts also he may have given his name as Yunis Uksfardi. He gives pointers to Europeans on which intermediate and advanced texts to study in order to extend their basic learning ("the first book I would recommend is... Gulistan, the Bed of Roses..."). William Jones informs the reader that if the learner follows his advice then he will be able to correspond with any prince in India and with any commoner within a year of starting his studies. He also suggests that mastery of the various aspects of Arabic (Arabick) will be completely essential for attaining truly dizzying heights in the knowledge of Persian.

Although William Jones' Persian Grammar is good as a book for learning Persian but it's not the best.. Perhaps it was the best book of its kind in English when it came out but then it was soon eclipsed by other Persian manual. Lt. Col D C Phillott's magnificent book comes to mind immediately as a later day example of a much more exhaustive text, but there is no doubt that William Jones's book was the path finder for learning Persian through English. William Jones' Persian Grammar proved so useful and famous that it has to date never really gone out of publication (latest edition 2010). For me, the true value of the book lies not so much in the main didactic section but rather in the Preface, which William Jones uses very well to converse with his reader and to put forth his case for the study of Oriental subjects.

I end by quoting the last paragraph from Yunis Uksfardi's Preface to his Persian Grammar:

" As to the literature of Asia, it will not, perhaps, be essentially useful to the greater part of mankind, who have neither leisure nor inclination to cultivate so extensive a branch of learning; but the civil and natural history of such mighty empires as India, Persia, Arabia and Tartary, cannot fail of delighting those who love to view the great picture of the universe, or to learn by what degrees the most obscure states have risen to glory, and the most flourishing kingdoms sunk to decay; the philosopher will consider those works as highly valuable  by which he may trace the human mind in all its appearances, from the rudest to the most cultivated state. and the man of taste will undoubted be pleased to unlock the stores of native genius, and to gather the flowers of unrestrained and luxuriant fancy"

I still can't get over Yunis Uksfardi being the nom de plume of William Jones. I think it would have been fantastic to meet him.


To know more about:

Yunis Uksfardi, I mean about...William Jones

LSR Krishna Sastry's quick read of a book on Sir William Jones

Wikipedia on William Jones

The collected works on Sir William Jones at Archive.org

A Grammar of the Persian Language (1771 edition)

A Grammar of the Persian Language (1828 edition) - this one has some useful footnotes to the Preface and the font is more legible.


Asiatic Society of Bengal
The official website - They have done a decent job of ensuring that some of the old manuscripts of India and scholarly papers remain in circulation.
Their history in their words

Learn Persian
Lt Col D. C. Phillott's fantastic book of Persian - Higher Persian Grammar (1917). Make sure you read the Introduction.
And while you're at it, also consider reading his true treasure, a book on Hindustaani Idioms,  Khazana - i Muhaawaraat (Treasure of Idioms) - highly highly recommended.

Or just check any of the 50 trillions websites which help you to learn Persian.

Daastaan - e - Amir Hamza and Hamzanama

A sketch I made quite a few years back, copied out from a miniature painting on Dasatan - e - Amir Hamza, an epic story of the trials and deeds of prophet Muhammad's uncle Hamza. All Islamic sources unanimously agree that the real Hamza idb Adb Al Muttalib, the Prophet's coeval uncle , died in the Battle of Uhud in 625 A.D. However Hamza's swashbuckling-hero-like qualities and the narratives of real journeys he may have made all over the Middle East, Iran, Turan and the Indian Sub-Continent have lived on in the tradition of Dasatan - e - Amir Hamza in Persian literature and other literatures which have a Persian influence.

This illustration shown above has been copied from one of the greatest illustrated books ever produced, the Hamzanama of Emperor Akbar. This book is a truly phenomenal piece of work. The 15 years long production of Akbar's Hamzanama is considered to be a seminal event in the history of Indian art as it initiated the radical propelling of the tradition of Mughal miniatures to the top echelons of world art. While on the Mughal subject,  it is interesting to note that the different Hamza epics frequently refers to Amir Hamza as Sahib - i - Qiraani, which means Lord of the Fortuitous Conjunction. This title was also used by Mughal chroniclers for their founder Timur. I have written a post on the titles used by Timur here. This takeover of Hamza's title by Timur or assigning of a common title to both personalities for reasons of providing an association is something which has always intrigued me.

Stories from Dastan - e - Amir Hamza are regularly performed on the Indian Sub-Continent and in South-East Asia by dastangoi performers and are quite popular with various groups of audience. Be sure to check out a Dastangoi performance of Dastan - e - Amir Hamza whenever you get an oppourtunity, it's worth it.

I didn't want to write much about the Dastan - e - Amir Hamza as it really is quite popular; I just wanted to share my love for a wonderful fantasy story. The following websites give a lot of information about this great epic:

Wikipedia on Dastan - e - Amir Hamza

Smithsonian Institution - Highly recommended, very beautiful and visual website which uses images from the original Hamzanama of Akbar to introduce the story. The illustration above is also on the introduction page of the Smithsonian Institution's website.

Victoria & Albert Museum holds Akbar's Hamzanama. This website gives some details of the book and also provides a glimpse of the great book.

An academic discussion on the format, size and nature of Akbar's Hamzanama. Here (website) and (pdf)

Tilsim - e - Hoshruba - Nice website on a late 19th century Urdu recasting of  Dastan - e - Amir Hamza by Indian writers who vastly expanded and changed the original premise of the Dastan. This work has been recently translated into English.

You can read more about the great Dastangoi art tradition here

And here's a fantastic Dastangoi performance I shot in Feb 2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu9GqO98Ukg&feature=plcp

Map of Names of Recent Revolutions - Jasmine Revolution

I am forever in love with maps. While doing a little research about why the revolution in the Arab world is called the "Jasmine Revolution" I realized that in recent years many revolutions have often been given non-political, non-personal names. So I decided to make a map out of this knowledge of names of recent revolutions. 

Libya and Syria are now included in this map. As of today, the 9th of April 2011, the date of the revision of this map, Muammar Gaddafi and the revolutionaries are still fighting each other in Libya and no negotiations have been started. Last night I did listen to a senior ex-Gaddafi minister on Hard Talk who was confident that Gaddafi is not going to be able to hold out much longer and the revolution in Libya will be successful. The NATO-led coalition is still fighting against Gaddafi's mercenaries.

Meanwhile in Syria 20 protesters more were killed in Dera in their struggle to overthrow President Bashar Al Assad. No progress there either. Each promise for reform made by President Bashar Al Assad is followed by a fresh wave of violence against the protesters. It's almost as if a promise made is a clear hint towards fresh retribution. So Syria is still in a revolutionary limbo as of now. Though the situation could change.

The revolutions and their names shown in this map chronologically are:

1. Carnation Revolution, Portugal 1974

2. Velvet Revolution, Czechoslovakia and USSR 1989

3. Rose Revolution, Georgia 2003

4. Orange Revolution, Ukraine 2004

5. Tulip Revolution, Kyrgyzstan 2005

6. Jasmine Revolution, Arab World 2010-2011

The Jasmine Revolution is a term specifically for the Tunisian events and I don't think the protests and unrest taking place at various hot-spots in the Arab World have all been clubbed under the umbrella term Jasmine revolution as yet. However it was Mohamed Bouazizi's sacrifice which sparked the domino effect in Tunisia, Algeria, Yemen and Egypt. The tremors are being felt all over the region and in certain Asian regimes as well.

I hope that the Arab people find themselves in a much better position once their struggle is successful. I also hope that peace comes to these people soon.

Click on the map to view a larger image.

I may have missed some other names of revolutions and I would like to know about these if this is the case.

Feel free to use this map for any purpose you like, just link back here / give credit. Email me for bigger file size or other file formats (pdf,gif,png etcetera)

Some observations on Perso-Arabic word choice in Urdu and Punjabi news broadcasts on All India Radio Delhi

14th July 2010 – AIR 666 MHz AM
Today in the morning I heard the news on the radio and discovered something interesting.  The radio channel AIR FM channel 666 MHz broadcasts the news in all of the 4 official languages of Delhi: English, Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi. Usually I just listen to the Hindi broadcast which runs for 15 minutes, and then the English broadcast of the same stories in the same words as the Hindi one, again runs for 15 minutes.

However sometimes I listen to the Punjabi and the Urdu news broadcasts as well, again 15 minutes each. The same stories, in the same order, with the same news matter, the same words just different languages .

Now what I noticed in today’s news broadcasts was that although often the Punjabi and the Urdu broadcasts use the same Perso-Arabic words for the same meaning in the same stories, in some places they use different words as well for the same stories.

Urdu and Spoken Punjabi have both developed in medieval India and both have been influenced by a common set of factors such as the Perso-Arabic lexicon of the ruling class, the Sufi tradition, the use of Persian as a court language in Medieval India and major cultural and literary overlaps. Although Urdu has taken on many more Perso-Arabic words than has Punjabi, there are still thousands of identical words shared by the two languages. My personal opinion is that upwards of 50% of the  Perso-Arabic words in Urdu are shared by many dialects of Punjabi as well. Coupled with the facts that the grammars of both Urdu and Punjabi are based on Prakarit, hence nearly identical, and that Hindustaani as a language is a common ground between both means that there is a high degree of mutual understanding between speakers of these languages.

Common Words
Both Punjabi and Urdu broadcasts used many common words and the list would be too long to mention here but I shall provide a few examples of special words to illustrate what I wrote above on the same stock of Perso-Arabic words being employed in these two languages:
Gawaahi (testimony), Hukoomat (governement), Tajweez (to suggest), Iqtasaadi (economic), Muhaiyya (make available), Intazaam (arrange), Qaanooni (legal), Dehshat Gard (terrorist) etcetera.
Here I have not mentioned any of the Perso-Arabic words used in regular parlance.

Different Words
On the day in question the choice of which Perso-Arabic to use in the same stories differed in the Punjabi and Urdu broadcast for the following words:

MEANING IN ENGLISH	WORD IN PUNJABI BROADCAST	WORD IN URDU BROADCAST
To Die A Martyr (verb)	شھید Shaheed	ھلاک Halaak
Counterpart (noun)	ھم عھدھ Hum Auhdah	ھم منصب Hum Mansab
Workers (noun)	ملازم Mulaazim	ارکان Arkaan

To be sure, all 6 of the words mentioned above are Perso-Arabic in origin as well as in their presently used forms. The respective news readers read out near identical sentences for the same stories; the only difference being the choice between which Perso-Arabic word to use from the two words given in the table above for a single meaning. The words from the Punjabi column are very close substitutes of the words from the Urdu column and vice-versa. The import remains the same regardless of which Perso-Arabic word has been used.
It is a case of so near and yet so far.

Let us look at these words in a bit more detail.


Same Words
1. The first word in the table, Shaheed is an Arabic word often used to denote an honourable death fighting for a cause, in other words it means to be martyred. It also stands for witness. Check out my earlier post on the relationship between the words Martyr and Witness.


2. The second word, Halaak is a Arabic word which is used to indicate total annihilation and destruction. In the sense of the totality of destruction Halak is close to the word Fanaa فناء though in India the former has a negative connotation and the latter is a Sufi term used for a positive annihilation of the self into the Creator.

3. The third word in the table, Hum Mansab is a hybrid Perso-Arabic construction. It is made up of a Persian word, Hum (means together/us) and an Arabic word Mansab (means rank). Hum Mansab means counterpart, another of the same rank/position.

4. The fourth word, Hum Auhdah, is a parallel to Hum Mansab and again, it is a hybrid Perso-Arabic construction. Auhdah is an Arabic word which means position//rank/social standing. Hence Hum Auhdah means of an equivalent position or standing.

From a lexicographical point of view both of these hybrid Perso-Arabic words are exact substitutes of each other when one want to use them in the sense of position in a hierarchy. Both Mansab and Auhdah can and do mean rank/position. The choice of which one to use should be germane to most speakers. However the second words of these hybrids help provide an explanation for the differing choice. Most speakers of Urdu, with a minimalistic level of Urdu education, would feel equally at home with both Mansab and Audah. On the other hand, nowadays the word Mansab has almost completely disappeared from the vocabulary of Hindustaani (or bazaar Urdu or filmy Urdu or call it what you will). Most speakers of Hindustaani would be uncomfortable with the word Mansab and would ponder over the import of this word. Most of these speakers would prefer the word Auhdah. As observed earlier, Punjabi is closer to Hindustaani that to Urdu. Hence the use of this word in the Punjabi broadcast. Now this explains why the Punjabi broadcast chooses to use Hum Audah. But then if these words are almost exact substitutes, why does the Urdu broadcast choose to use Hum Mansab?

Well it turns out these words are not exact substitutes all the times. Perhaps the preference for Mansab over Auhdah lies in the historical use of the word Mansab. Throughout Islamic history, in the various Islamic armies, Mansab has been the preferred word for rank. It was always used in the Medieval and Pre-Modern royal courts in the Sub Continent for official and military rank . In fact, the East India Company whole heartedly adopted this word for rank in its muster rolls and even incorporated the Pre-Mughal and Mughal rank of Mansabdaar as a rank of substance in its official military hierarchy. Some, or perhaps many, Urdu speakers would associate Auhdah more with social hierarchy and Mansab specifically with official hierarchy. I have always heard the Urdu broadcast choose Mansab over Auhdah when talking of the rank of a government official . Hence somewhere the more appropriate construction, Hum Mansab, is preferred over the almost there but not quite, Hum-Auhdah, while talking about officials of equivalent rank.
As a side, I would like to mention that speakers of Urdu and Hindustaani use many such hybrid Perso-Arabic words in everyday speech. Some common examples are Bey Shak (=certainly, Bey - Persian, Shak – Arabic), Naa Mumkin (=impossible, Na – Persian, Mumkin – Arabic), Bad Zaat (=bad character, Bad – Persian, Zaat – Arabic), Dast-e-Khatt (=signature, Dast-e – Persian with ezaafe, Khatt - Arabic), Bad Tameez (=unmannered, Bad – Persian, Tameez – Arabic), Hum Safar (=co-traveller, Hum – Persian, Safar – Arabic) etcetera. This feature of Urdu/Hindustaani wherein hybrid Perso-Arabic words are employed, is one of the reasons why some people draw parallels between Urdu and Ottoman Turkish and Urdu and Chughtai Turkic.

5. The fifth word Mulaazim comes from the Arabic triliteral root LZM and means a lieutenant, an indispensable person, an employee. Many of us in India are unacquainted with this “indispensable” origin of Mulaazim and think of it to connote only  a servant / an empolyee.

6. The sixth word is Arkaan. It is the plural form of the Arabic Rukun. Rukun means a pillar, basis, bolster, the foundation. It is a very close substitute of the original meaning of the previous word Mulaazim, used during the Urdu broadcast. For clarity on this I would like to thank Jamshed Saahab who guided me towards the right word, Arkaan.

It is still not very clear as to why there is a difference between the choice of word for the same meaning between the two broadcasts. The difference could be due to a form of diglossia. However this is not to suggest that one of these is a more classical or “higher” language than the other and this is why I shy away from associating the Urdu-Hindustaani phenomenon with diglossia. And of course, I am completely incompetent to speak on matters of linguistic and language theory anyway. Perhaps this has nothing to do with diglossia at all. However the choice of which Perso-Arabic words to use could be the result of perceived diglosia amongst the speakers of Urdu and Hindustaani in the sub-conscious of those who frame the sentences for the respective broadcasts. One need not be a linguistic to believe that different people use slightly different vocabulary sets for the same / similar languages.

The difference in choice of words could also be due to politics, due to dialectical differences, due to differences in the educational environment of those who frame the news broadcasts, due to the different books the news framers read, etcetera.

Nevertheless there is a difference, and this difference between choice of Perso-Arabic words for the Urdu and the Punjabi broadcast excites me. This difference points out the commonality, the unity. Vive le difference.





PS – There is another difference between the Punjabi and Urdu news broadcasts on AIR FM which comes to my mind. Just like the English and the Hindi news broadcasts, the Urdu news broadcast too has a short section at the end which gives a round up of the headlines in the day’s major newspapers in the concerned language. Hence in the last section of the day’s Urdu news broadcast, the news reader reads out the headlines from 4 or 5 of the major Urdu dailies published in Delhi on that morning.
However this headlines’ round up section is absent in the Punjabi news broadcast as although Punjabi is one of the four official languages of Delhi, there are not many Punjabi newspapers of note published in Delhi (perhaps there are none).