History of Sindhi language
Sindhi is an Indo-Aryan language with about 17 million speakers in the south-eastern province of Sind in Pakistan and about 2.8 million people in India.
The Sindhi language first appeared in writing in the 8th century AD and a number of different scripts have been used to write it. Sindhi literature, in particular lyric poetry, began to appear towards the end of the 15th century.
Sindhi is an ancient language of the world and it is taken from the language sanskrit. The fact that Sindhi is mostly written in the Arabic script, gives some people the impression that it is a Persio-Arabic tongue. Professor E. Trumpp in his monumental `Sindhi Alphabet and Grammar' (1812) writes: "Sindhi is a pure Sanskritical language, more free from foreign elements than any of the North Indian vernaculars."
The Rev. Mr.G. Shirt of Hyderabad, one of the first Sindhi scholars, considered that the language is probably, so far as its grammatical construction is concerned, the purest daughter of Sanskrit. It has small sprinkling of Dravidian words, and has in later times received large accessions to its vocabulary from Arabic and Persian.
Sindhi is a very sweet and melodious language. Writes Dr. Annemarie Schimmel, Harvard professor of Islamics, and versatile linguist: "Since every word in Sindhi ends in a vowel, the sound is very musical."
It is the language of Saints and Sufis of ancient Sindh. It has been the inspiration for Sindhi art, music, literature, culture and the way of life. Many great poets and literatis have been profoundly inspired by the beauty of Sindhi language.
Sindhi became a popular literary language between the 14th and 18th centuries. This is when mystics or Sufis such as Shah Abdul Latif, Sachal Sarmast, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar (as well as numerous others) narrated their theosophical poetry depicting the relationship between humans and Allah.
The modern Sindhi alphabet is used in Pakistan and is based on the version of the Perso-Arabic script used to write Urdu. It was adopted, under British influence, in 1852.
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