A Corpus Based Quantitative Survey of the Etymological Elements in the Basic Vocabulary of Urdu Language
Abstract
This article is the last of a series on the topic of the etymological components of the basic vocabulary of Urdu language as well as their density within the language. Each of the articles was aimed to calculating the density of a particular etymological element in the basic vocabulary of Urdu. The research is significant since it is the first corpus-based survey of the density of the etymological elements in the basic vocabulary of Urdu. The calculation is conducted utilizing a corpus of one thousand words of the basic vocabulary and extracting the origin of each word through an etymological analysis. The words are then classified by language of origin and the precise percentage of each language element obtained. While the previous research (Maldonado García 2014, 2015, 2015a, 2015b), dealt with the density of individual etymological elements, this one treats this topic as a whole, dealing with all of the language elements at one time and comparing the etymological analysis with historical facts. The study debunks the widespread theory that Urdu was a language of the armies, artificially created at some point in history when the Arab, Persian and Turkish armies met at an unidentified geographical location producing the birth of Urdu as a mixture of their languages. After the identification phase of this project, it was revealed that from an etymological and historical perspective, Urdu derived from Sanskrit into the Prakrit languages through a process of evolution and has received influence from Persian, Arabic and English during the period of the invasions. No elements of Turkish language were found during the analysis
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