‘Marathi language is influenced by Persian’

Pune: Asman (sky), killa (fort), kagad (paper), jahaj (ship), phakt (only), saal (year), khurchi (chair) are Persian words. Surprised! Don’t be. Many of Marathi and Hindi words are actually similar to Persian language words it because of their origin.

“Well, it is interesting to know that majority of Marathi and Hindi words are actually borrowed from Persian language and the reason is simple. The roots of Indian languages are found in Sanskrit or Devnagari similarly, the roots of Persian language are in Avasthan”,” said language expert Sadeg Bagh, who’s pursuing his doctoral research at the Deccan College. 
 
According to him, Sanskrit is one of the ancient languages from the Indo European Family of languages and so is Old Iranian (or Old Persian). ‘Stan’ (Persian) and ‘sthan’ (Sanskrit), both are derived from the same ancient root (shared by Sanskrit and Persian) meaning place or land.”

“Thus, we find similarities between Indo-European and Indo-Aryan families of languages”, he said adding that similarly, many Muslim rulers ruled the Indian sub-continent and Persian was the language of the court,” he said. 

“Besides that the travellers, traders, Sufi saints, poets who came in the sub-continent, brought the culture, language and mannerism with them”, said Sadeg. Rajasthani language too is influenced by Persian language”,”  he said.

Persian is a very simple language which has no gender differentiation or definite or indefinite articles, he said. There is much similarities between Urdu and Persian language too. Urdu is nothing but effect of Persian. It has Hindi grammar, but most of the words are Persian, Sadeg mentioned. In fact, Urdu too has many Persian words like Biryani, Tandoor, Khema, Faluda.

It’s not only that the language is influenced by Persian even the architect, food habits etc. Sadeg is writing a textbook showing the similarities. There are no books after 1955 showing the similarities however, there are 203 books written in Persian language, but none in Hindi-Persian, Marathi-Persian or Urdu-Persian ones, he said.

Certificate course in Persian language
The college is offering a certificate course in Persian language for last three years. “The course is of 15 weeks’ duration with 30 sessions. Each session is of two hours. We have 50 students studying in three different levels of the language,” he said. 

“This year, the course will begin from February 16. The course has got a very good response as many want to learn this language for reading the coins, old historical documents, to translate the documents and many other purpose.”