GRAMMAR OF THE URDŪ LANGUAGE.
CHAPTER I.—Alphabets.
- Urdū is perhaps the easiest, as well as the most widely spoken, of all the Indian languages. It is often called Hindūstānī, hut this term might include both the Urdū and the Hindī, as spoken by the natives of Northern India, and also the Dakhanī, a patois of the Southern Peninsula, much in use among the Mohammedan population. The Persian word Urdū signifies 'a camp,' and was originally applied to the dialect which took its rise in the camp and court of the renowned Emperor Akbar Khān, in the sixteenth century, from a mixture of Hindī (the chief element) with Persian and, to a minor extent, Arabic. Thus it had a threefold origin, and it is remarkable how the number three pervades the grammatical divisions and structure of the language.
- The Urdū Alphabet is founded primarily on the Arabic, which consists of twenty-eight letters. To this the Persians, who adopted it, added three letters, in order to represent certain consonantal sounds not included in the Arabic; and for a similar reason three more were finally added to represent certain Indian consonants (in the Deva-nāgarī or Sanskṛit Alphabet), the exact equivalents of which were not found in either the Arabic or Persian Alphabet. Thus the total number of letters forming the Urdū Alphabet is thirty-four. These are all either Arabic letters or modifications of them. But, besides the Persi-Arabic characters,
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