Some items which are not independent lexical units of the language have been entered as headwords, viz. If the user of the dictionary fails to find a given word, which appears to be a compound, in the entry for its apparent first member, he or she should therefore look for it as a headword before concluding that it has not been included. This procedure is normally followed in the case of compounds consisting of words borrowed from Sanskrit.Ĭompounds formed on words of other origin have in various cases been entered as headwords, however, rather than under their first members. jal-kriya ‘offering of water’ is entered under jal ‘water’, and similarly many other compounds formed on this base. The structure of the language favors the use of compound words built upon single base units.Ĭompound words are usually not entered individually as headwords but under the base word on which they are formed, e.g. Run-on forms.ġ Headword (the word to be glossed), in Devanagari script. Some information about the structure and presentation of the dictionary entries is provided below.Įntries may contain up to twelve parts, in the following order: 1. There was a correspondingly increased use of words of Indian origin in the new style, and in particular of Sanskritic words. The use of an Indian script, and a smaller component of Persian and Arabic vocabulary than often used in the Urdu of the time, were essential prerequisites to this end. Modern Hindi by contrast arose in the nineteenth century to meet a different need: for a linguistic vehicle that should allow communication with, and among, a wider section of the north Indian population than had been possible in practice in the case of Urdu. Urdu, an earlier specialization than Hindi of a mixed speech of the Delhi area which had gained currency as a lingua franca, had arisen broadly because of an increasing artificiality in the use of Persian for literary and other formal purposes in Indo-Muslim circles during the later Mughal period. One potentially identical with modern Hindi at the spoken level while expressing a distinctively Persian cultural orientation at more literary levels. Modern Hindi co-exists in this region with regional forms of speech more or less closely cognate to it and with many local dialects, as well as with Urdu, a complementary style of language:
The term ‘modern Hindi’ denotes a language written in the Devanagarī script and relatively standardized in its written form (but less so in pronunciation and spoken usage) which is in general use today in most of north and central India.
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