Learn the writing system
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| INTRODUCTION |
| Eric: Hi everyone, welcome back to UrduPod101.com. I’m Eric. |
| Afrah: Assalam u alaikum Urdupod101.com mein khush amdeed. I’m Afrah. |
| Eric: This is All About, Lesson 2, Cracking the Urdu Writing System. In this lesson, Afrah and I are going to explain a little bit more about one of the most unique aspects of the Urdu language, the writing system. |
| Afrah: That’s right. There are a lot of things that we’re going to cover in this lesson. |
| Eric: Definitely. The Urdu writing system is actually pretty different from those usually used in western languages, but we’re here to make the trip through it easy and fun. |
Lesson focus |
|---|
| Afrah: Let’s start with the basics, the name of the script. |
| Eric: It’s the Nastaliq script, right? |
| Afrah: Exactly. Do you know why it’s called that? |
| Eric: I don’t! |
| Afrah: Well, in the development of Urdu, the Persian language and its scripts have played an important role. Urdu has many words and grammar rules that come directly from the Persian language. Nastaliq was originally an Iranian script that is used by the people of Iran for writing the Persian language. Due to the strong Persian influence, the Nastaliq script was adopted for Urdu as well. |
| Eric: And the Urdu alphabet consist of 10 vowels and 39 consonants. Afrah, that sounds like a lot of consonants! I hear Urdu uses a system of letters, but they’re very different from English. |
| Afrah: Yes, what you might think of as letters are mostly consonants. The whole system comes from Khariboli and the pronunciation of these consonants has largely been preserved in modern Urdu. |
| Eric: Okay, so do you have letters for vowels? |
| Afrah: Yes, we do, but they are mostly indicated using something called airaab which are applied to the consonants to form syllables. |
| Eric: So wait, what are those exactly? |
| Afrah: They’re marks, not unlike the diacritics in the Latin alphabet, and they indicate the sound of a whole letter. |
| Eric: Interesting. |
| Afrah: The main difference in appearance is that most of the airaab connect directly to these consonant letters, while diacritics generally do not touch the letters of the Latin alphabet. |
| Eric: Ah, so how many letter forms are there in Urdu? |
| Afrah: There are more than 100 basic letter forms in Nastaliq. |
| Eric: Are you kidding me? It took me long enough to learn the Roman alphabet! |
| Afrah: (laughs) That may sound daunting, but I have some good news. One is that these airaab are often very predictable. So once you learn a certain rule, you can read whole classes of letter forms. And then there’s one more good point. |
| Eric: What’s that? |
| Afrah: You write exactly as you speak. So once you learn the pronunciation of the individual letter forms, spelling is a breeze. |
| Eric: So, Nastaliq is a phonetic based script. |
| Afrah: And there’s no case distinction. You don’t have to worry about complicated grammar rules that tell you when to use an uppercase or a lowercase letter. |
| Eric: Okay. This is sounding better and better. Any more good news? Are there any tricky punctuation rules? |
| Afrah: Nope. It’s very similar to English, if not simpler. We write horizontally right to left. Spaces mark the separation between words and we have simple punctuation marks to mark the end of the sentences. |
| Eric: Great. Nastaliq is starting to sound pretty easy. I’m ready to hear more about these airaab. |
| Afrah: First, there are only 10 of them. |
| Eric: That still sounds like a lot to me! |
| Afrah: Don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it very quickly. I’m sure everyone can do it. So let me tell you about a basic letter. It’s called [k] [ک]. If you put an airaab on the upperside of the letter, [k][ک], you will have [ka]کا |
| Eric: Okay. |
| Afrah: Now there are also airaab for sounds like E. |
| Eric: I think I see where we’re going with this. |
| Afrah: Just put that airaab on the lower side of the letter [k] and you will have |
| Eric: A [ki] sound. Okay, this doesn’t sound so hard. |
| Afrah: Exactly. It just takes a small amount of memorization and practice. |
| Eric: I’ll definitely have to study that in more detail, but I think I’ve got the basics. |
| Afrah: You can learn more about these airaab in other lessons, in the PDF notes that accompany this lesson, and definitely on the UrduPod101.com website. |
| Eric: I think I understand them now, but what if we want to write two consonants lumped together without any vowel in between? |
| Afrah: Very good question. We actually just chop off the trailing part of the first consonant letter and attach what’s left to the second consonant. |
| Eric: Can you give an example? |
| Afrah: Sure, like in [kya], which means “what.” We just chop [k] in half and attach the letter for [ya] to it. |
| Eric: That doesn’t sound so hard. |
| Afrah: You can form many more words like this. |
| Eric: This is all making a lot of sense. What about imported sounds, Afrah? |
| Afrah: Urdu has borrowed a large number of words from foreign languages over the years. |
| Eric: And sometimes, those languages have sounds that aren’t native to Urdu. |
| Afrah: So we just use the closest letter in Nastaliq and the rest is all the same as for the other languages. |
| Eric: How easy! |
| Afrah: Yes. The next step in learning Nastaliq is actually to look at the script. But it would be difficult to describe it in an audio-only format. |
| Eric: So listeners, definitely check out the accompanying PDF lesson notes or go to UrduPod101.com for more information. |
| Afrah: Eric, you know how to read Nastaliq pretty well. How did you learn it? |
| Eric: Well, first I practiced saying the original letter forms on their own one by one, and then I just practiced reading the words, then sentences. Pretty soon, it came quite naturally. |
| Afrah: Yes, I imagine it’s as easy as reading English when you get the hang of it! |
Outro |
| Eric: So keep at it, listeners! Okay, that’s all for this lesson. Thank you for listening, everyone, and we’ll see you next time! |
| Afrah: Phir milenge! |
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