The trilateral root ‘ha-fi-za’ in Arabic means to protect, preserve, guard or sustain. Hifz is the noun form of the root and it means ‘preservation’ or ‘protection’. In Hindi/Urdu we also use hifaazat (protection, safety) which is a...
Ka-ma-la, the Arabic trilateral root for ‘perfection’. Most Hindi/Urdu speakers are familiar with this root from usages like kamaal ka meaning ‘excellent, wonderful’ and ‘kamaal hai!’ which means ‘Great!’ but more often...
The task of learning, memorising, and eventually using new words in a foreign language can be daunting. Compared to the finite number of rules that govern grammar systems with its conjugations and declensions, the number of new words to learn in a foreign language...
Although spoken English is quite easy to learn, a fact that certainly in part helped to make it the most commonly learnt second language on the planet, English is also one of the toughest languages for any learner to master, native or not, as far as its spelling is...
This article is a sister article to the earlier 101 articles treating features of word-formation Hindi has inherited from Sanskrit. Features discussed in those articles are: vowel sandhi, vowel gradation, prefixes and suffixes. In the present article students and...
This is the first in a series of 101 articles intended as a short introduction of the system of vowel combination called sandhi, which Hindi has, in a fossilised form, inherited from Sanskrit. Since the system is fossilised, i.e. does no longer produce new...
