09/29/07

Lesson 4

Can you by looking at the figure above identify the following words in the next figure ? They consist of Urdu words in the first line and English in the next one.

The answers are Pakistan ( this is a different form of S - a new letter will be introduced in the figures sometimes before without pre-warning and you have to make a best guess what it might sound like - its a good practice to get into as often some of vowel marks are not written and one has to occasionally guess in reading normal Urdu ) . The words are Mama and Neem on the first line. The second line has mint , no , potato and the final line has name and then mine. Note the hamza - a little one put over a vowel when one vowel follows another as here in the word MINE the vowel AA is followed by EE.
. Other points to note are that the initial B or P has a short vertical rather than horizontal line when it has a vowel with it as in the word NO above and that the letter S often has an elongated shape as in the word Pakistan . Note also that the mark over the t in potato converts it into a hard T as in Turkey.

It seems that the first soldiers who got to the subcontinent did not speak the Queen's English . So that the word CALL ( to call ) somebody is usually written and pronounced as CAAL rather than CAUL by Urdu speakers. Also there is a tendency to add an I at the beginning whenever an English word is written with Urdu script , so the word SPIRIT for eg. is written and pronounced as ISPIRIT , school is written as ischool etc. Here however we will try and stick close to the English pronunciation.