Knowing a language’s history can definitely help when learning a language. A history of a language can help in understanding the etymology of many of the words as well as influences from other languages. Hindi is a language that has a huge influence from and on a variety of other languages. Some of these languages include Arabic, Urdu, Spanish, Greek, Italian, German, etc. Hindi and Urdu are essentially the same languages with different scripts. Hindi uses the Devangari script and is a direct descendant of Sanskrit.
Knowing the history of Hindi has allowed me to find similarities between Hindi words and Arabic words for example. I took a semester of Arabic, and realized there are quite a few words that both languages share. For example, “kitab,” meaning book, is common to both Arabic and Hindi.
The history of a language allows people to really appreciate not only the language but the cultural significance behind a language. We are able to gain a deeper understanding for both the culture and its language.
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