lproven | Anglish as an insight into other tongues

Maybe it's just me, but a thought occurs to me. Consider the contrast between Anglish, as in Uncleftish Beholding, and standard English. When one tries to read Anglish, all the little words are familiar, by and large, barring a few which are obscure or archaic, but which one can guess or work out. However, one becomes lost when looking at the longer words: they are not our language, one has to mentally deduce what they mean and substitute meaningful equivalents. I needed to consult a periodic table much past "stonestuff". :¬)

I wonder if this is what it is like for, say, a speaker of Urdu encountering Hindustani, or vice versa. The underlying language is the same, but Urdu draws on Persian (AKA Farsi or Parsi - the language of the Pharisees, you see) and Arabic vocabulary and is written in Arabic, whereas the Hindi form, Hindustani, draws on Sanskrit vocabulary and is written in Devanagari. Hearing it, you recognise the little words, but the big nouns and adjectives wash over you, nearly but not quite understood.

I don't know, directly; I speak no urdu, hindi or anything like it myself. It was, though, interesting to meet and talk to Ritesh, a colleague of

kjersti's in Oslo. As I've never been to India, he's the only Indian I've ever spoken with who has little or no "contamination" with English. He found is fascinating to draw me out and discover all the hindi words I knew that I didn't realise I knew - sure, we all know khaki, bungalow, shampoo, stuff like that, but I also am familiar with channa, tarka, dhaal, naan, puri, ghosht, bindi and bhindi, aloo, muttar, gobi, paneer, saag and many more. :¬) It might be different if I wasn't so fond of curry, of course...