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Learning Urdu (part 2)

It is now over 2 years since I started to learn Urdu. I have already posted a blog on my initial observations. 

As time has progressed, I am slowly becoming more familiar with the language, and, when I improvise a new sentence, some of my "guesses" prove right. 

One thing to get used to is that "a" is a marker of the masculine singular (in Indo-European languages I am familiar with, it is a marker of feminine singular), "i" is a marker of feminine gender (singular and plural), and "e" is a marker of the masculine plural. 

Urdu verbs seem quite straightforward. In the infinitive, verbs typically end in "na" ("hona" to be, "karna" do to, "sona" to sleep, "sunna" to hear etc.). When conjugating a verb, the root is used with or without an ending, eg "mein kam KARTA hun" means "I am working" where KARTA is the root KAR plus the ending TA to express a habitual present tense. 

Vocabulary is proving quite difficult to memorise as, in many cases, it bears little relation to the Indo-European vocabulary with which I am familiar. There are some familiar words: naam (name), pina (to drink), tum (familiar version of you), kamre (room), and so on. 

As in any language, there are a number of oddities which seem to defy logic or appear unnecessarily complicated. The numbers seem quite complicated and, while they follow a certain pattern, are not self-evident. There appear to be a lot of tenses; I am not sure quite how many as yet. 

Another complication is the writing system, based on that of Arabic. Even the number of letters appears to be fluid, depending on how you count them. It appears there are 39 letters plus 13 extra characters. Not only do the letters change their shape depending on their position in a word; they appear quite different in different typefacse and writing styles. A number of the phonemes (sounds) do not have an equivalent in other familiar Indo-European languages such as retroflexive R, or retroflexive T. The modern way of writing is far easier to decypher than the "hanging" writing known as "nastaliq". 

I have recently discovered a table of pronouns and their declensions which should make it easier to navigate the cases. Urdu has "postpositions" rather than "prepositions", so "You live in London" would be "Aap London MEIN rehete hain." The word MEIN ("in") follows the place it is in, rather than preceeding it. There seem to be a lot of these postpositions. Some of them composite ("the friend is with me" would be "dost aap KE PAS hay" ("friend you with is").

  

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