Syed Ahmad Dehlvi

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For Hadith scholar and academic, see Syed Ahmad Dehlavi (academic).
Mawlānā
Syed Ahmad Dehlvi
TitleKhan Sahib
Personal
Born8 January 1846
Delhi, Mughal India
Died11 May 1918(1918-05-11) (aged 72)
ReligionIslam
Notable work(s)Farhang e Asifiya

Syed Ahmad Dehlvi (also written as Sayyid Aḥmad Dihlawī; 8 January 1846 – 11 May 1918) was an Indian Muslim scholar, linguist, lexicographer, philologist, educationist and an author of Urdu language. He compiled the Asifiya dictionary.

Biography[edit]

Syed Ahmad Dehlvi was born on 8 January 1846 in Delhi, Mughal India.[1][2] He was the son of Hafiz Abd al-Rahman Mongheri, a descendant of Abdul Qadir Jilani.[3]

Dehlvi assisted S W Fallon in dictionary projects between 1873 and 1879.[1] He taught at Shahi Madrasa, located in the Arab Sarai, in Delhi.[3] He was later appointed as a teacher of Urdu and Persian in the Municipal Board High School, in Himachal Pradesh. He was a fellow and examiner at University of the Punjab and served as the vice-manager of Government Book Depot in Lahore.[2]

In 1914, Dehlvi was honored with the title of Khan Sahib by the Government of British India.[3][2] He died on 11 May 1918.[1]

Literary works[edit]

Dehlvi's works include:[2][4]

  • Farhang e Asifiya
  • Hādi-un-Nisa
  • Lughāt-un-Nisā
  • ʻIlmullisān : yaʻnī, insān kī ibtidāʼī, darmiyānī aur ak̲h̲īr zabān
  • Rusūm-i Dihlī
  • Qiṣṣah-yi Mihr Afroz
  • Munāẓirah-yi taqdīr-o-tadbīr, maʻrūf bih kunzulfavāʼid.
  • Muhakama-e-Markaz-e-Urdu[5]
  • Muraqqa-e-Zuban-o-Bayan-e-Dehli[6]

Opinions on Urdu vocabulary[edit]

Syed Ahmed Dehlavi estimated in the Farhang-e-Asifiya[7] Urdu dictionary, that 75% of Urdu words have their etymological roots in Sanskrit and Prakrit,[8][9][10] and approximately 99% of Urdu verbs have their roots in Sanskrit and Prakrit.[11][12] Urdu has borrowed words from Persian and to a lesser extent, Arabic through Persian,[13] to the extent of about 25%[8][9][10][14] to 30% of Urdu's vocabulary.[15]

Legacy[edit]

Zahrah Jafri wrote Sayyid Aḥmad Dihlavī: ḥayāt aur kārnāme (transl. Sayyid Aḥmad Dihlavī: Life and works).[16]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c Parekh, Rauf (29 April 2013). "Farhang-i-Aasifiya: a dictionary reflecting cultural heritage". Dawn. Retrieved 3 January 2021.
  2. ^ a b c d Asir Adrawi. Tazkirah Mashāhīr-e-Hind: Karwān-e-Rafta. p. 116.
  3. ^ a b c Lal, Mohan, ed. (1992). "SYED AHMAD DEHLAVI". Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature: Sasay to Zorgot. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. p. 4262. ISBN 9788126012213. Retrieved 3 January 2021.
  4. ^ "Profile of Syed Ahmad Dehlvi on WorldCat". WorldCat. Retrieved 3 January 2021.
  5. ^ "محاکمۂ مرکزِ اردو" [Muhakama-e-Markaz-e-Urdu]. Urdu Gah.
  6. ^ "مرقعِ زبان و بیانِ دہلی" [Muraqqa-e-Zuban-o-Bayan-e-Dehli]. Urdu.
  7. ^ "Farhang-e-Asifiya" [فرہنگِ آصفیہ]. Urdu Gah.
  8. ^ a b Ahmad, Aijaz (2002). Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia. Verso. p. 113. ISBN 9781859843581. On this there are far more reliable statistics than those on population. Farhang-e-Asafiya is by general agreement the most reliable Urdu dictionary. It was compiled in the late nineteenth century by an Indian scholar little exposed to British or Orientalist scholarship. The lexicographer in question, Syed Ahmed Dehlavi, had no desire to sunder Urdu's relationship with Persian, as is evident even from the title of his dictionary. He estimates that roughly 75 per cent of the total stock of 55,000 Urdu words that he compiled in his dictionary are derived from Sanskrit and Prakrit, and that the entire stock of the base words of the language, without exception, are derived from these sources. What distinguishes Urdu from a great many other Indian languauges ... is that it draws almost a quarter of its vocabulary from language communities to the west of India, such as Persian, Turkish, and Tajik. Most of the little it takes from Arabic has not come directly but through Farsi.
  9. ^ a b Dalmia, Vasudha (31 July 2017). Hindu Pasts: Women, Religion, Histories. SUNY Press. p. 310. ISBN 9781438468075. On the issue of vocabulary, Ahmad goes on to cite Syed Ahmad Dehlavi as he set about to compile the Farhang-e-Asafiya, an Urdu dictionary, in the late nineteenth century. Syed Ahmad 'had no desire to sunder Urdu's relationship with Persian, as is evident from the title of his dictionary. He estimates that roughly 75 percent of the total stock of 55.000 Urdu words that he compiled in his dictionary are derived from Sanskrit and Prakrit, and that the entire stock of the base words of the language, without exception, are from these sources' (2000: 112–13). As Ahmad points out, Syed Ahmad, as a member of Delhi's aristocratic elite, had a clear bias towards Persian and Arabic. His estimate of the percentage of Prakitic words in Urdu should therefore be considered more conservative than not. The actual proportion of Prakitic words in everyday language would clearly be much higher.
  10. ^ a b Taj, Afroz (1997). "About Hindi-Urdu". University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Archived from the original on 15 August 2009. Retrieved 27 March 2018.
  11. ^ "Urdu's origin: it's not a "camp language"". dawn.com. 17 December 2011. Archived from the original on 24 September 2015. Retrieved 5 July 2015. Urdu nouns and adjective can have a variety of origins, such as Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Pushtu and even Portuguese, but ninety-nine per cent of Urdu verbs have their roots in Sanskrit/Prakrit. So it is an Indo-Aryan language which is a branch of Indo-Iranian family, which in turn is a branch of Indo-European family of languages. According to Dr Gian Chand Jain, Indo-Aryan languages had three phases of evolution beginning around 1,500 BC and passing through the stages of Vedic Sanskrit, classical Sanskrit and Pali. They developed into Prakrit and Apbhransh, which served as the basis for the formation of later local dialects.
  12. ^ India Perspectives, Volume 8. PTI for the Ministry of External Affairs. 1995. p. 23. All verbs in Urdu are of Sanskrit origin. According to lexicographers, only about 25 percent words in Urdu diction have Persian or Arabic origin.
  13. ^ Versteegh, Kees; Versteegh, C. H. M. (1997). The Arabic Language. Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231111522. ... of the Qufdn; many Arabic loanwords in the indigenous languages, as in Urdu and Indonesian, were introduced mainly through the medium of Persian.
  14. ^ Khan, Iqtidar Husain (1989). Studies in Contrastive Analysis. The Department of Linguistics of Aligarh Muslim University. p. 5. It is estimated that almost 25% of the Urdu vocabulary consists of words which are of Persian and Arabic origin.
  15. ^ American Universities Field Staff (1966). Reports Service: South Asia series. American Universities Field Staff. p. 43. The Urdu vocabulary is about 30% Persian.
  16. ^ Zahrah Jaʻfrī. Sayyid Aḥmad Dihlavī: ḥayāt aur kārnāme. OCLC 659319893. Retrieved 3 January 2021.

Bibliography[edit]

  • Asir Adrawi (2 April 2016). Tazkirah Mashāhīr-e-Hind: Karwān-e-Rafta (in Urdu). Deoband: Darul Muallifeen. p. 116.
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