Articles
Two languages, one parent. These are the essays written for the Bhashao app, published here in full so they are easy to share: what makes Hindi and Gujarati sisters rather than strangers, the handful of sound rules that bend one into the other, how the Gujarati script lost its top line, and which words the two borrowed together from Persian, Portuguese and English.
Sisters, not strangers
Hindi and Gujarati grew from one parent, and much of their core vocabulary is the same word worn down two different ways. So why can a Hindi speaker not simply follow Gujarati? What “sister” means exactly, why it is not the same as borrowing, why no date marks the parting, and how this app labels each pair.
The line that went missing
Take a Devanagari chart, rub out the bar along the top of every letter, and you are most of the way to reading Gujarati. The two scripts match nearly letter for letter, and the exceptions fit on one hand: a retroflex ળ Hindi never uses, a dotted row Gujarati never adopted, two letters for the open vowels of loans, and an r that will not take u the ordinary way. Here is the map, what is and is not known about how the line came off, and a plan for reading ભાષાઓ by the end of a weekend.
Where Hindi says aa, Gujarati says o
To a Hindi ear, Gujarati sounds like Hindi with the endings bent. The bends are regular: a handful of sound rules turn घोड़ा into ઘોડો, खाना into ખાવું and मित्र into મિત્ર, and each can be learned in a minute. Here are seven, including one of the places where the two languages part for good.
A bazaar without a z
Hindi and Gujarati borrowed the same Persian and Arabic words, and a Hindi speaker will recognize nearly all of them. But Gujarati spelling never took the letters that came with the words, so the bazaar lost its z, saaf lost its f on paper, and paper itself came out with a letter Hindi does not have. How the words arrived, what happened to them at the door, and where the trail runs out.
The key that came by sea
Turn a chaabi in Delhi or a chaavi in Rajkot and you are, by the standard account, saying a Portuguese word. Four centuries of Portuguese forts and ships on the Gujarat coast left both languages a layer of household words, some shared, some taken by only one sister, and a couple whose road nobody can trace. Then English arrived and the same thing began again, in each language’s own way.
