Talk:Urdu/Archive 8

Urdu from a linguistic perspective
Urdu: An Essential Grammar, authored by Ruth Laila Schmidt and published by Routledge in 2005, states:

Colloquial Urdu, authored by Tej K Bhatia & Ashok Koul, and published by Routledge in 2005 states:

Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore, authored by Mary Ellis Gibson and published by Ohio University Press in 2011, states:

The introduction of the article on Urdu in the current edition of Encyclopedia Britannica states:

The introduction of the article on the Hindustani language in the current edition of Encyclopedia Britannica states:

Urdu Through Hindi: Nastaliq With the Help of Devanagari, authored by Afroz Taj and published by Rangmahal Press in 1997, states:

The Rhetoric of Hindutva, authored by Manisha Basu and published by Cambridge University Press in 2017, states:

Colloquial Urdu, authored by Tej K Bhatia & Ashok Koul, and published by Routledge in 2005 states:

Hindi Christian Literature in Contemporary India, authored by Rakesh Peter-Dass and published by Routledge in 2019, states:

The Culture of India, authored by Kathleen Kuiper and published by Rosen Publishing in 2010 states:

Education, Ethnicity and Equity in the Multilingual Asian Context, authored by Jan Gube & Fang Gao and published by Springer Publishing in 2019, states:

Error analysis of the Urdu verb markers, authored by Sharmin Muzaffar & Pitambar Behera and published in the Aligarh Journal of Linguistics in 2014, states:

English transference of Hindustani: A pragmatic-stylistic study of Gulzar's poetry, authored by Pallavi Kiran and published in the Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities in 2018, states:

Adapting Predicate Frames for Urdu PropBanking, authored by Riyaz Ahmad Bhat, Naman Jain, Dipti Misra Sharma, Ashwini Vaidya, Martha Palmer, James Babani & Tafseer Ahmed and published through the DHA Suffa University, the University of Colorado and the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad in 2014, states:

The Geographical Cradle of Urdu, authored by Jai Pal Singh & Mumtaz Khan and published in the Annals of NAGI in 2016, states:

Poems from Iqbal: Renderings in English Verse with Comparative Urdu Text, authored by V.G. Kiernan and published by Oxford University Press in 2013, states:

Script Directionality Affects Nonlinguistic Performance: Evidence From Hindi and Urdu, authored by Jyotsna Vaid and published in Scripts and Literacy in 1995, states:

Though much of what is said here is common knowledge to those familiar with the history of Urdu, I have added these sources here should anyone find them helpful to reference in the near future. I hope this helps. With regards, AnupamTalk 21:47, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

Comments

 * Comment As usual, helpfulness will be increased if the linguistic perspective is actually based on linguistic sources, and if we commit ourselves to sticking to the latter. There is no lack of good linguistic overview literature. Non-specialized sources which only give background information about Hindi-Urdu are of little value and give no less the impression of WP:CHERRYPICKING as Fowler&fowler's approach. Come on, the last quote starts with "The national language of India...", what are we to do with such a source in this context (no doubts implied about its eventual merits regarding its main topic, which is NB not language/linguistics)? –Austronesier (talk) 09:39, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your input User:Austronesier. I provided many of these sources as they are printed by academic presses and neutrally present introductory information about Urdu. I appreciate your efforts to compromise and help form consensus above and hope that we can continue working on that soon. Kind regards, AnupamTalk 01:42, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Ok, let me be more concrete: I am very specifically asking not to use the last three sources, plus Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore and The Rhetoric of Hindutva, since they touch upon the topic of this page only as background information. They may be useful in a WP:COMMONNAME discussion (and certainly as source about their respective primary topic), but not as source for building content here, including lede defintions. Obviously, none of these authors' primary intention was to speak as an authority of Urdu.
 * This is most obvious with Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore, where the author reproduces information from another source, e.g. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 by Christopher Bayly (Cambridge University Press, 1996), NB again not a source that primarily covers Urdu.
 * And at least in the case of the last source (Gube & Gao), the factual error about India having a "national language" bitterly illustrates why we should not rely on everything that falls into our hands that happens to mention the term "Urdu". This doesn't do justice to real sources about Urdu, such as e.g. the Routledge volumes by Schmidt and Bhatia & Koul in your list. Your insistence on using random sources is very uncompromising. –Austronesier (talk) 13:27, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
 * User:Austronesier, I've actually never insisted that these sources be used. Rather, I've listed several references, published by academic presses, journals and encyclopedias, that provide a definition of Urdu. I'm glad you appreciate some of them at least. You're also welcome to do some research yourself and bring to the table what you think might be helpful. I will continue to add to this list what I believe will be beneficial so that when we address the lede in December, we will have plenty of good sources to draw from. Thanks, AnupamTalk 15:00, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
 * This is not a matter of taste or appreciation. WP:CONTEXTMATTERS is a guideline to a WP policy. Information provided in passing by an otherwise reliable source that is not related to the principal topics of the publication may not be reliable; editors should cite sources focused on the topic at hand where possible. How can we proceed to a consensus, when the consensus sine qua non (=adhering to WP policies) turns into some kind of optional thing? –Austronesier (talk) 16:04, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
 * User:Austronesier, since your last comment to me, I spent my valuable time and added additional sources to this section. Instead of showing appreciation for that, you spent your time resorting to making veiled assumptions about my sincerity and further criticizing my work. If you don't want to help bring sources to this article yourself and be respectful to me, then why are you here? If you'd like to participate here, please be collaborative and not overcritical, especially when I actually am trying to show respect for your perspective by taking my time to do additional research and find the kinds of sources you prefer (though I have no obligation to do so). Note that in the section above, it was me that listened to what other editors had to say and suggested new edits in light of them. Please be careful with your future comments. Thanks, AnupamTalk 17:08, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

I don't think it is overcritical when I observe that 1. "Urdu from a linguistic perspective" is a misnomer as long as it cites non-linguistic sources; 2. non-specialist sources are given the same weight as specialist sources, which is simply undue. Shall I say, I appreciate the effort? When its randomish result will put the burden of finding out what can be taken from it for building quality content on our fellow editors who undertake the laudable effort to actually read their way through this textwall (I mean not your list, or Fowler&fowler epic construction site, but all of this current discussion)?

Again, this has nothing to do with a personal preference. An article about Peru benefits from sources about Peru, or in a wider perspective, from sources about the geography, history etc. of Latin America, but not exactly from citing sources about let's say goat herding, even if they contain a chapter about "Goat Herding in Peru" including a nutshell portrait of Peru (exchange ad lib with "Quantum physics"~"Telecommunication", "Arnold Schoenberg~Sydney Opera House etc). Please respect my concern for source quality, too. And FWIW, I happened to cite a small sample of pretty much non-off-topic sources at an earlier stage of this discussion. Simple decent stuff, just add Bhatia & Koul and Tariq Rahman (From Hindi to Urdu: Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, a symbol of Muslim identity in (north) India and a widely spoken language in the South Asian diaspora spread all over the world. In its spoken form it is so similar to spoken Hindi that, in fact, it has far more second-language users than the numbers of its mother-tongue speakers would suggest.), and we would have a wonderfully simple and broad starting ground, without resorting to random finds. –Austronesier (talk) 18:22, 25 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Comment I can appreciate the diversity of citations shared by Anupam. I think that the Britannica articles on Urdu and Hindustani in particular are beneficial and provide a good model of what we should include in the lead. Much of what is found there is also seen in the current version. LearnIndology (talk) 21:07, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks User:LearnIndology! I agree that they will be good models on which we can base the lede on here when we rewrite it later this year. Your continued participation is welcome. Kind regards, AnupamTalk 03:13, 27 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Comment The Britannica pages on Urdu and Hindustani are not written by scholars but general-purpose editors who do this sort of editing across a wide range of articles. For example, the Britannica article on Urdu is written by an editor who generally works on North African and Middle-East topics.  Although I once attempted to use them for another WP page, these articles without bylines are not reliable for citing on Wikipedia, only those with the bylines of scholars are.  And there I'm willing to make an exception about third-party sources as Britannica has sufficient oversight; what emerges in its scholarly articles is effectively third-party.  I will add some names from Britannica to my list in the section above.   Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  17:51, 27 September 2020 (UTC)