Literary Notes: Urdu grammar, grammatical terms and an Urdu book on Persian grammar.

Byline: Rauf Parekh

IT seems that many things are frozen in time and they have not changed for centuries, neither will they. One such thing is Urdu grammar and the terms used by grammarians of Urdu.

One of the most popular and authentic books on Urdu grammar is named Qavaid-i-Urdu. Written by Baba-i-Urdu Moulvi Abdul Haq, the book was first published in 1914 and has been reprinted for the umpteenth time. Another very good book on Urdu grammar is Misbah-ul-Qavaid. Written in 1904 in two parts by Fateh Muhammad Khan Jalandhari, the book has a very lucid style. But a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then.

With all the respect and awe that these grandees inspire, what perturbs one is that every new book written on Urdu grammar uses the same centuries-old terms. The problem is terms used in Urdu grammar were initially borrowed from Persian and Arabic. Some of the early books on Urdu grammar gave the literal translations of the definitions taken from books on Arabic and/or Persian grammar. In some cases, the examples were translated literally and even the names, such as Zaid and Bakr, were not changed.

This creates two problems: Arabic is a Semitic language while both Urdu and Persian belong to Indo-European family of languages. The syntax of Arabic is much different and some examples translated verbatim do not apply completely to Urdu. Secondly, some terms might at times mean a slightly different thing. For example, in almost every book on Urdu grammar two different terms are used for 'adjective' and an adjective is alternatively called 'sifat' and 'ism-i-sifat'. At the same time these books define a noun as 'ism', confusing the readers about a word if it is a noun or an adjective.

Some issues surface because of the fact that in Urdu all the parts of speech are divided into just three parts: 'ism' (noun), 'f'eal' (verb) and 'harf' (a class of words that includes some parts of speech). This is the way it is done in Arabic. But English has eight parts of speech, clearly defining each part. Modern-day grammarians of Persian have deviated from the past and now Persian grammar is written in a way quite different from Arabic, using different terms.

Another problem is that an infinitive is rarely sufficiently described in an Urdu book and readers are confused if a word is an infinitive (masdar) or verb (f'eal) because these books define an infinitive exactly as some Arabic books do. What complicates things is the fact that verbs are not...