Bilal acts as my guide as I drive through the jam-packed streets of Saddar. When we reach Daudpota Road he asks me to head towards ‘Laal Farsh’ (Red Floor).

I must have looked confused, because he stops, laughs, and then corrects himself: “I meant Hong Kong Shopping Plaza”.

Bilal has spent eight years on the street, and has spent this entire time fighting for his survival: food, shelter and societal predators are just some of the things that he has to look out for on a daily basis. He is 18 years old now, and works for an NGO that helps street children. But, he says “old habits die hard”.

The street children are completely alienated from mainstream society, as the mainstream society has alienated itself from them. They have their own form of communication, their own process of identification, their own culture.

City landmarks are given names based on their personal interactions and understanding of the place—their reality is largely defined by the social and personal context through which they interact with the external world.

For them Zainab Market is ‘Thanda Garam’ (hot and cold), as there are shops with generators and shops with out them. As they walk around the corridors of the market, they can feel a significant change in temperature as they flit from one shop to another, hence the name Hot and Cold.

They call Bolton Market ‘Daal Chawal’, because the place is known for its ‘langar’, free food distributed among the poor.

Then there is Kala Pul, where they get Biryani for just seven rupees. They call it ‘7 ki biryani’.

The older lot, who have been introduced to mainstream society, often laugh when they look back in retrospect. Tanveer, an 18-year-old who has lived on the street since he was six, chuckles: “For a very long time our little gang had no idea that clothes could be washed. When our clothes got dirty we would just throw them away and steal fresh clothes.”

Drugs are a norm for them—they do it for recreation, but maintain that “a little bit does no harm”. But when they are caught red-handed using such substances, they seem unable to hide the fact that it makes them lose their senses. “I just woke up from a deep sleep,” says a six-year-old child, whose head bobs like a helium balloon tied to a string. His friends tell me that he just sniffed a large amount of Samad Bond.

But with awareness campaigns by the civil society, glue has become hard to access for these street children.

They stick together for survival and fend for each other, often forming groups of four or more. They give these groups names like ‘Chota Group’ and ‘Cheeta Group’, and assign each member with a job.

Tanveer, who once headed the Chota Group, shares how they would all care for each other like a family. “Each of us had a task, I would clean cars, and every day we would gather our money together and decide what to do with it. Those were good times, Rs250 were all we needed for a day,” he says with a smile. He harkens back to when he was fourteen, when political workers from the area captured and lashed him. “When I came back I was bleeding profusely from the cuts. My friends lit a fire from tree branches and used the fire to keep my back warm overnight. They took turns, and fed me for five days, till I had the strength to stand up.” He pauses, and then adds: “They cared for me, like a mother for her child.”

The Board of Studies meeting, held here today under the chairmanship of Director ICS Dr Ahsan Akhtar Naz, was also attended by the Dean Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences Prof Dr Mughees-ud-Din Sheikh, Anwar Waqar Azeem, Dr Abdul Siraj and Dr Noshina Saleem, after through discussion decided the introduction of said subjects from session 2010-2012. The Board of Studies also recommended the University Syndicate to change the existing nomenclature of Mass Communication degree from MA in Communication Studies to MSc in Communication Studies. Besides, with a view to familiarizing journalism students with our time-tested and trust-worthy friend China ‘ language, the Board of Studies also decided to introduce Chinese language as an elective subject at the ICS.

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According to the popular myth, Urdu is a ‘camp language’ or ‘lashkari zaban’ because it originated in the army camps of the Mughals. The reasoning — if it can be called as such at all — behind the so-called theory is that Urdu is a mixture of words taken from different languages such as Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Hindi. The soldiers who spoke these languages were recruited to the Mughal army and to communicate among themselves they used this new language, and thus Urdu was born. People holding this view cite the fact that ‘Urdu’ is a Turkish word and it literally means ‘lashkar’ or ‘army’ or ‘army camp’. Interestingly, there is hardly any language in the world that has not absorbed words from other languages.

English, being most ‘open’ of them all, has, according to David Crystal, borrowed from over 100 languages, but nobody has ever called English a mixture of different languages.

It was Mir Amman (1750-1837) who first presumed Urdu was born that way. In his preface to ‘Bagh-o-Bahar’ (1802), he wrote that Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (who reigned between 1628 and 1658) made Delhi his capital and named its bazaar ‘Urdu-e-moalla’. According to Hafiz Mahmood Sherani, what Mir Amman had written about Urdu’s origin was paraphrased by many writers over the next 100 years or so, and it included figures like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Muhammad Hussain Azad, Syed Ahmed Dehlvi (compiler of ‘Farhang-e-Aasifya’), Chiranji Lal (compiler of ‘Makhzan-e-muhavraat’), Imam Bakhsh Sehbai and, in the 20th century, Hakeem Shamsullah Qadri. This repetition naturally lent credence to the theory and it became ‘common knowledge’ that Urdu was a ‘camp language’, made up of words from different languages. Even scholars like A.F. Rudolf Hoernle and G.A. Grierson were misled and believed in the theory initially. But when Grierson carried out massive research on the dialects and languages of India he admitted his mistake. After writing in the ninth volume of his famous ‘Linguistic survey of India’ (1916) that “Literary Hindustani [Urdu] is based on the vernacular Hindustani spoken in the Upper Doab and in the Western Rohilkhand”, Grierson adds in the footnotes that “it will be noticed that this account of Hindustani and its origin differs widely from that which has been given hitherto by most authors (including the present writer), which was based on Mir Amman’s preface to the ‘Bagh-o-Bahar’. According to him Urdu was a mongrel mixture of the languages of the various tribes who flocked to the Delhi bazar”.

Now the question is: why is this theory of so-called camp language incorrect?

Hafiz Mahmood Sherani and Shams-ur-Rahman Farooqi have described in detail that the word Urdu was in use much earlier than the Mughal period and it had carried different nuances through centuries. The word ‘Urdu’ was used for this language much later, in fact in the last quarter of the 18th century, and in the beginning the word ‘Urdu’ had quite different meanings. Also, the Urdu language has had many names before the present nomenclature came in vogue. Those who are convinced that Urdu was born in Shah Jahan’s era ignore the fact that the Mughal era began in 1526 after Babar’s success at Panipat while poets like Ameer Khusrau (died 1325) had been composing poetry in Urdu much earlier than that. Even in Babar’s writings one can find quite a few Urdu words. In other words, the Urdu language did exist before Shah Jahan and it was there even before the name Urdu was given to it.

Those who believe in the ‘lashkari zaban’ myth perhaps think that it is possible to form a new language by combining two or more languages. This is not the case. Max Muller, the renowned linguist, has given us two guiding principles in this regard: one, the classification of a language and its relationship with the other language is based on morphological and syntactical structures of that language and vocabulary has very little importance in this regard; two, it is totally wrong and misleading to believe that by combining two or more languages a new, third language can be formed. A language may get enriched and strengthened by obtaining nourishment from the dialects and languages spoken in its surrounding geographical territories, but it is impossible for a language to form a new language by inter-mingling with another one.

A language takes centuries, even more, to evolve. It is a slow, long, constant, complex and natural process. A language ‘invented’ to serve a specific purpose, such as enabling the troops to communicate with one another, is labelled as ‘artificial’ by linguists. Though there have been hundreds of such attempts, some aimed at facilitating international communication between nations and peoples speaking different languages, none has been successful. Esperanto, a language formed with the basic roots of some European languages, died despite its early success. In other words, experiments to devise a language have failed and no artificial language could survive. Urdu, like other languages of the world, has been classified by linguists on the basis of its morphological and syntactical features. 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.

Around 1,000 AD, the modern Indo-Aryan era began and with the arrival of Muslims Arabic, Persian and, to a lesser extent, Turkish vocabulary began assimilating into local dialects. One of those dialects later evolved further and became an early version of Urdu/Hindi. Now the only question remaining unanswered is which dialect or dialects developed further to become a language that was basically one and was later divided into two languages, Hindi and Urdu, on the basis of two different scripts.

Though there are a number of theories about the origin of Urdu (that is, aside from camp language theory) that say, for example, Urdu has its origin in Punjabi, or it was born in Deccan or in Sindh, few have stood up to research based on historical linguistics and comparative linguistic. Of the theories considered to be holding water, the most plausible seems to be the one that says Urdu developed from some dialects spoken in and around Delhi in the 11th and 12th centuries AD. These dialects include Brij Bhasha, Mewati, Khari Boli and Haryani, which, in turn had developed from Apbhransh. The name Apbhransh refers to a number of languages/dialects which were born from Prakrit languages. The question that still requires a precise answer is: from which Apbhransh did Urdu originate? Some linguists believe it was most probably an offshoot of Shourseni Prakrit, spoken in and around Mathura. Dr Gian Chand Jain says it was Khari Boli.

In brief, Urdu is much older than just a few hundred years and its roots go right back to Sanskrit. At least, it has been established beyond doubt that Urdu is not a camp language.
Dawn
drraufparekh@yahoo.com

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Ms Ellis congratulated the students on their accomplishment, saying, “When you learn a new language, you don’t just learn about words but also about the culture and the purpose behind all words. This understanding is the real gift of language learning. It is a gift we hope will stay with you through your entire lives.”

Sixteen students graduated from the two-year Access English Microscholarship Program organized by the US Consulate General Lahore’s Public Affairs Section at the madrassa for boys.

As she gave away certificates to the students, Ms Ellis noted what an honor it was to work with the Madrassa for the past two years and how proud she was of their students for completing the course.

One student, using what he learned from the English language course, thanked the US Consulate General in English during the ceremony for the opportunity to learn a new language, which might not have happened without the Consulate General’s support. The News

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Sentences like Yoda you form?

Many linguists believe all human languages derived from a single tongue spoken in East Africa around 50,000 years ago. They’ve found clues scattered throughout the vocabularies and grammars of the world as to how that original “proto-human language” might have sounded. New research suggests that it sounded somewhat like the speech of Yoda, the tiny green Jedi from “Star Wars.”

There are various word orders used in the languages of the world. Some, like English, use subject-verb-object (SVO) ordering, as in the sentence “I like you.” Others, such as Latin, use subject-object-verb (SOV) ordering, as in “I you like.” In rare cases, OSV, OVS, VOS and VSO are used. In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Merritt Ruhlen and Murray Gell-Mann, co-directors of the Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages, argue that the original language used SOV ordering (“I you like”).

“This language would have been spoken by a small East African population who seemingly invented fully modern language and then spread around the world, replacing everyone else,” Ruhlen told Life’s Little Mysteries.

The researchers came to their conclusion after creating a language family tree, which shows the historical relationships between all the languages of the world. For example, all the Romance languages (Italian, Rumanian, French, Spanish) derive from Latin, which was spoken in Rome 2,000 years ago; that Latin family is itself a branch of an even larger tree, whose other branches include Germanic, Slavic, Greek, Indic and others. Together, all those languages make up the Indo-European language family, which fits like a puzzle piece with all the other language families in the world. 

“These families — all families — are identified by finding words in a set of languages that are similar to each other but not found elsewhere,” Ruhlen explained in an email.

In the language family tree, Ruhlen and Gell-Mann discovered a distinct pattern in how word orders change as languages branch off from their mother tongues. “What we found was that the distribution of the six possible word orders did not vary randomly. … Rather, the distribution of these six types was highly structured, and the paths of linguistic change in word order were clear,” Ruhlen said.

Out of the 2,000 modern languages that fit in the family tree, the researchers found that more than half are SOV languages. The ones that are SVO, OVS and OSV all derive directly from SOV languages — never the other way around. For example, French, which is SVO, derives from Latin, which is SOV.

Furthermore, languages that are VSO and VOS always derive from SVO languages. Thus, all languages descend from an original SOV word order  –  “which leads to the conclusion that the word order in the language from which all modern languages derive must have been SOV,” Ruhlen wrote.

Was it just an accident that the mother of all mother tongues was probably SOV, rather than one of the other five possibilities? The researchers think not. Predating Ruhlen’s and Gell-Mann’s work, Tom Givon, a linguist at the University of Oregon, argued that SOV had to have been the first word order, based on how children learn language. He found that the SOV word ordering seems to come most naturally to humans. [Why Are 'Mama' and 'Dada' a Baby's First Words?]

And if that’s the case, it seems strange that languages switch word orders as they evolve. Indeed, no one really knows why word orders would switch. “We have found that word changes in very precise ways,” Ruhlen said. “But the fact remains that half of the world’s languages still have SOV word order because, in Murray’s and my opinion, they have not changed word order at all.  [Our data] shows how word order changes … but it is unpredictable if word order will change, and I really don’t know why.”

  *   How Colors Got Their Symbolic Meanings 
  *   What If Neanderthals Had Not Gone Extinct?
  *   What Distinguishes Humans from Other Animals? 

Copyright © 2011 TechMediaNetwork.com. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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The students of Roots School System presented a programme, which reflected on all vistas of German life from its language, poetry, art and dance to its exquisite cuisine.

The Rootsians presented a perfect cultural panorama and transported the amused audience on a magic carpet ride to visit various parts of Germany as well as on a wondrous journey through all the provinces of Pakistan. The whole performance had a complete German flavour to it with students dressed in German attire, waving German flags and fluently speaking in German language. The German stalls alongside vibrantly decorated Pakistani stalls displayed interesting information about Germany. The programme also emphasised on Pak-German unity and goodwill.
In the end, Elizabeth Franz appreciated the rich cultural dance performances and expressed her gratitude for the enthusiasm and zeal displayed by the students on their tremendous welcome.The news.

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Along with training in spacewalks, robotics, and piloting a spaceship, NASA is requiring that all future astronauts learn to speak and read Russian.

The rules are plain and simple: If you flunk the foreign language requirement, you can’t go into space.

A handful of NASA astronauts have taken Russian language training since the U.S. and the Soviet Union began work on the Mir space station in the ’80s, Duane Ross, manager for astronaut candidate training, told FoxNews.com. But in 2009, the space agency revamped its rules — and now all U.S. astronauts will havfe to learn Russian.

“English is the agreed-to language in space,” Ross explained. But due to the close collaboration with the Russian space agency, it’s now mandatory for America’s astronauts to speak Russian, he said.

NASA retired its fleet of space shuttles in July, leaving Russia’s Soyuz rockets as the sole means of transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station, a sign to many that the Russians have “won” the space race. 

Many former astronauts, NASA administrators and government officials view conceding the space race as simply unacceptable.

“When China can reach the moon and we cannot, I don’t see why any other nation would regard us as a world leader,” former NASA administrator Mike Griffin told members of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology on Sept. 22

“Get the shuttle out of the garage,” famous moonwalker Gene Cernan said. “It’s in its prime of its life. How could we just put it away?”

With the demise of Constellation — an overbudget program to develop a space shuttle replacement that President Obama cancelled in 2010 — NASA realized how heavily it would be forced to rely upon Russia.

Around the same time, the space agency instituted the new proficiency requirement for all astronaut candidates, Ross told FoxNews.com.

“In 2009, we knew those folks would all be travelling to the space station so we made that a requirement,” he said. “There’s a certain level of proficiency they have to attain to pass.”

Russia clearly realizes the extent to which the U.S. space program relies upon it. Within months of the January 2010 news that Constellation was being cancelled, Russia announced plans to more than double the cost of seats on its Soyuz rockets, from $26.3 million per astronaut to as much as $55.8 million in 2013 and 2014.

And three months ago, immediately following the safe touchdown of the shuttle Atlantis (the final flight of America’s shuttle program), Russia’s space agency noted the historic accomplishments of the U.S. space program — and proclaimed the start of Russian domination in space.

“From today, the era of the Soyuz has started in manned space flight, the era of reliability,” the Russian space agency Roskosmos said on July 21.

So long — and thanks for all the help, the statement seemed to read.

NASA seems to realize how awkward its Russian-language training must seem: The most recent brochure for the Astronaut Selection and Training program makes no mention whatsoever of the Russian-language requirement, despite pages of copious details about the other aspects of training.

Ross told FoxNews.com that the space agency plans to revamp the brochure soon.

On Monday, the space agency announced it would be seeking around 8 to 12 new astronauts to bolster its roster, following a National Research Council report that warned the U.S. astronaut corps was dwindling.

To learn more about astronaut training — or to apply for the class — visit astronauts.nasa.gov.

It’ll help if you can speak Russian.

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India has been delegated the International Domain Name extension for Urdu Language, which will allow Indian authorities to sell domain names with Urdu fonts, reported DNA India.

In addition to Urdu, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body that governs website addresses, has allotted a total of seven international domain names (IDN) to India. Other languages for International Domain Names delegated to India include: Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil and Telugu.

Subject to last stage ICANN approval, this will make India the first and only country to have Urdu domain name extension.

Pakistan has also applied for Urdu domain name extension (a little late though), for which the string evaluation (URL in asci-code for local language) has been passed, however, ICANN is yet to delegate Urdu language ccTLD to Pakistan, which may take at least 6 months.

Saudi Arabia, Russia, UAE and Egypt are only countries with their local language domain names.

With this delegation of Urdu IDN to India, the domain names will be sold by the National Internet Exchange of India – the agency which has been allocating ‘.in’ domain names.

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These findings published in the Advanced Access online edition of the journal Brain confirm a decade of past studies that have also concluded more schooling equals a decreased risk of suffering from dementia, defined as the “loss of intellectual functions” including memory, orientation, calculation, language, attention and thinking.

Carol Brayne, MSc, MD, MRCP, MFPHM, a professor of epidemiology and principal investigator at the University of Cambridge, led the study and discovered higher education and loss of intellectual functions is not reserved solely for the upwardly mobile or those with healthier lifestyles.

“People with different levels of education have similar brain pathology but … those with more education are better able to compensate for the effects of dementia,” noted the researchers.

According to a July 24 University of Cambridge announcement, “each additional year of education” decreases your risk of developing dementia by 11 percent.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates over 29 million suffer from dementia globally and projects “Africa, Asia and Latin America together could have more than 80 million people with dementia by the year 2025.”

Co-author of the study, Hannah Keage, PhD, a research associate at Cambridge funded by the Marie Curie International Incoming Research Fellowship, explained “education in early life appears to enable some people to cope with a lot of changes in their brain before showing dementia symptoms.”

Brayne underscored the point saying, “Education is known to be good for population health and equity. This study provides strong support for investment in early life factors which should have an impact on society and the whole lifespan.”

Additionally, Lon White, MD, MPH, a research scientist and neuroepidemiologist at the Kuakini Medical Center in Hawaii, told Relaxnews, “both low educational attainment (reflecting childhood experiences) and stress during middle adult life appear to be legitimate risk factors for late onset dementia. “Everybody sees the phenomenon, and no one really understands it.”

The WHO explains, “Global population ageing will inevitably result in huge increases in the number of cases of dementia. The risk of developing the condition rises steeply with age in people over 60; the possibilities for prevention and treatment are limited. ”

“It is particularly interesting because most of our education occurs in childhood, but the dementia is at the end of life,” said White. The news

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