12 Tenses In Urdu Pdf Download
Savage Doherty
Do you aim at passing through the labyrinth of Urdu tenses without becoming lost in it? Like you, many Urdu learners are hesitant to enter the intricate maze of Urdu-language tenses and their numerous conjugations for the present, past, and future.
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There is no future tense in Urdu; the future is in the hands of Allah, it is not for mortal men to speak as if they presume to know what it holds. But Pakistan's players must at least have feared for their future as the day wore on.
Can you guess what I did on seeing this, Language Log readers? (Apart, that is, from muttering imprecations under my breath, not for the first time, about how I simply do not understand the tendency for people to talk about language as if they can just make stuff up and nothing needs to be fact-checked.) I know a little about the Indic languages, and I do have some of the right books. So I got up, walked across my office, and plucked my rather ancient (1962) copy of Teach Yourself Urdu from the shelf.
This is from page 44, in the chapter on the verb, first subheading:
Notice that the book is giving single inflected forms: the first word in each example above is a pronoun (1st, 2nd, and 3rd person downward, singular and plural across), and the second word is a verb inflected in the future tense.
So what the hell did Mike Brearley think he was doing? What is the strange nature of linguistic subject matter that leads journalists, and writers of all sorts, to mouth off about it without a care, announcing random falsehoods as fact? Metallurgical claims are treated as needing at least some kind of fact-checking with metallurgists: you can't just assert that lead is highly brittle at room temperature or that vanadium explodes if put in contact with water. But linguistic claims are left to the same sort of uncontrolled mouthing-off as totally subjective opinions about food or fashion.
Brearley could describe the Pakistanis' uniforms as looking awful if he wanted: it's just a matter of a personal opinion. He could say their play was inept and clumsy; that's presumably something he is paid to know about. He could even comment on the disgustingness of the post-weekend corruption story that has broken in Britain about members of the Pakistan team planning to fail deliberately at certain times by advance arrangement with betters who want to place money on their failures: that would be a moral judgment that it would be quite reasonable to assert.
But how on earth did he form the impression that he could treat factual claims about their well-known language in just the same way, and make random assertions about its tense system? Urdu has between 60 and 70 million speakers, all of whom know the future tense; taken together with Hindi, with which it is almost identical in its grammar, it is in fact the 4th most widely spoken language in the world. The Wikipedia page on Urdu grammar actually gives an analysis under which Urdu has two future tenses, a contingent future and a definite future. So much for not offending Allah by presuming to talk about events that are to come. Brearley was just spouting garbage.
Never mind; I ask only rhetorically; do not bother to answer. I mean my questions merely as exasperated exclamations about a world in which people do not grasp the idea of human language being the subject matter of an interesting empirical discipline.
There is no future tense in Urdu; the future is in the hands of Allah
A local pundit wrote the same about Arabic a while back. We (the local Arabists) proceeded tore him a metaphorical new one, but these people are made of teflon.
As for the theological point, I've heard that one before as well, and it seems to be based on a misunderstanding of a Quranic passage in Sūrat al-Kahf:
Another relevant question is how many of the Pakistani cricket team are native speakers of Urdu. According to sources quoted here, Urdu is the native language of only about 7% of the country's population.
Hmm, apparently they've totally revamped Teach Yourself Urdu; in my 1999 edition the future conjugation is on page 131 (and uses a different example verb). Anyway, nice demolition job, and I'm mindboggled by the commenter who apparently has no problem with journalists making things up. Sheesh.
I'm going to give this guy the benefit of a doubt and assume that he read this factoid somewhere. I've seen other languages that treat future events in an unfamiliar way described as "having no future tense" in non-academic writing lots of times. I think the simplest explanation is that he read this somewhere and felt no reason to doubt it because he doesn't have the education in linguistics to know how poor popular writing about language really is.
It's annoying, but I think that this particular journalist might be less personally negligent and more handicapped by the fact there's such a large amount of crap written about language, and relatively few people who study it.
Kutsuwamushi,
I think the simplest explanation is that he read this somewhere and felt no reason to doubt it
The problem is that he apparently did not feel any reason to VERIFY it. These days, you don't even need to lift your butt, just type urdu + grammar in the search engine of your choice or go directly to Wikipedia.
[(myl) Well, the first three guys in the first column of that list (Abdul Razzak, Azhar Ali, Imran Farhat) were born in Lahore, which probably means their native language is Punjabi; the fourth guy (Khalid Latif) was born in Karachi, which I gather means that there's roughly a 50% chance that he's an Urdu native speaker; the next guy (Mohammad Asif) is another Punjabi (from Sheikhupura); then there's Mohammad Yousuf from Lahore, etc. Scanning through the listed birthplaces of the rest of the team, it looks to me as if the majority of them are probably native speakers of Punjabi.]
Brearley's only really a part-time journalist, better known for being one of England's most successful captains (a pinnacle being the legendary Ashes 3rd Test at Headingley in 1981) and latterly a psychoanalyst, management consultant and speaker.
Still, his academic background (Cambridge undergraduate and postgraduate, which he apparently figured important enough to lead to a 2-year gap in his professional cricket career in his late 20s) might make you think he would check his facts more assiduously than some other sportsmen-turned-journos. Not to mention that he first went to Pakistan as long ago as 1966 as MCC U-25 captain.
Ironically, one could make a better (though not very good) argument that there is no _present_ tense in Hindi-Urdu: what was historically the present tense has today become the subjunctive; and in order to express a present meaning, one must use periphrastic forms of the verb "to be" along with aspectually marked participles.
In playful seriousness, though, linguists should set out to start writing popular news articles about subjects like metallurgy, computer hardware, heart surgery, etc., inserting "true" facts here and there as a way of exacting revenge on the world. For example, did you know that the heart stops pumping blood during REM sleep? (That's to keep it fresh.)
It seems to me a little disingenuous to say that a language doesn't have a certain tense just because it handles it periphrastically rather than inflectionally. Does English have a past perfect only in some strong verbs?
the post-weekend corruption story that has broken in Britain about members of the Pakistan team planning to fail deliberately at certain times by advance arrangement with betters who want to place money on their failures
My rebuff is much like Scott's (and equally serious). GKP is just being prescriptivist about the expression "is no future tense in Urdu", which Brearly plainly intends to mean "are two future tenses in Urdu". Why shouldn't he use it that way? Who died and made you garbanzo?
A bit of trivia following a previous post: Portuguese and Spanish preserve many traces of the period of muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula in the lower middle ages. Among these is the word 'oxal', which is of course but a slight romanisation of the jaculatory 'inshallah'. Perhaps for symmetry, a straight 'se Deus quiser' (if God wills) was also much favoured in everyday talk until quite recently. All this trusting in Providence was powerless, however, in preventing the development of nothing less than three future tenses in Portuguese. It is certainly for better expiating such impiety that speakers have a choice of five different tenses in which they may regret the past.
@Sharl
Yes, Islam predates Urdu by about a thousand years. Greatly simplified, Urdu is the Muslim dialect of Hindustani, written with Arabic characters and with borrowings from Arabic and Persian; while Hindi is the Hindu dialect, written in Devanagari, with borrowings from Sanskrit. In Pakistan, Urdu is spoken largely by migrants from India during partition, including many of the professional class. Latest figures about Pakistani languages I have are:
Oh come on, don't act as if people are *especially* prone to make up "facts" and be generally wrong or bad at their jobs when it comes to *your* field. As empiricists, surely we can bother to check this out somehow. My hypothesis: people are sloppy thinkers and uninformed pontificators whether it has to do with linguistics, or medicine (homeopathy?), or politics (birth certificates?) or business or whatever.
Given Brearley's association with Pakistan through cricket, don't you think the chances are that he was told this factoid by a native-speaker, like S.W. above? That's not like "reading it somewhere", in that most people wouldn't question it at all.
I'm appalled at such a shoddy interpretation. The truth is that the the blood goes into reverse direction during REM sleep (and keeps going in that direction until the next REM sleep period). True the heart has to stop for a moment as it changes gears, but the reverse direction is the important part.
This is why REM sleep is so important, a regular change in the direction of the blood flow keeps the humours in balance. It is also important to match the directional flow of blood in transfusions.