
English and Urdu possess quite different word order and morphology characteristics, although they belong to the Indo-European language family. Both languages have a protracted history.
The history of English is conventional, if perhaps neatly, divided into three periods called Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. The earliest period begins with the migration of certain Germanic tribes from the continent to Britain in the fifth century A.D. However, no records of their language survived before the seventh century and continued until the end of the eleventh century or a bit later. By that time, Latin, Old Norse, and the Anglo-Norman French of the dominant class after the Norman Conquest in 1066 had substantially impacted the lexicon, and the well-developed inflectional system that typifies the Old English grammar had begun to break down.
On the other hand, Urdu is a primary South Asian language that has been gaining popularity since India and Pakistan’s advent. It is one of the eighteen national languages listed in the constitution of India, as well as the national language of Pakistan. Historically, Urdu developed in the eighteenth century. Two relatively similar standard forms of the language developed in Delhi and Lucknow in modern Uttar Pradesh. Since 1947, a third form, Karachi, standard Urdu, has evolved.
Table of Contents
English and Urdu Writing
English and Urdu have various similarities and differences in terms of word order, phrases, clauses, and sentences. For instance, English is read and written from left to right, while Urdu is read and written from right to left. Both languages differ in morphological and syntactic features. Let’s unravel the similarities and differences between Urdu writing and English writing based on word classes, phrases, clauses, and sentences.
Word Classes
English and Urdu have distinct grammar and rules. English has eight-word classes or parts of speech: nouns, determiners, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. On the other hand, the Urdu language has seven-word classes that are mainly similar to English. It has nouns, numerals, adjectives, postpositions, pronouns, adverbs, and verbs. Both have nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs, but the significant contrast lies in grammatical gender. English nouns do not have gender, while Urdu nouns are either masculine or feminine. Besides, in English, nouns fall into several sub-categories, including common vs proper, mass vscountable, and concrete vs abstract nouns. In Urdu, nouns fall flatly into six types: common, proper, collective, abstract, concrete, and mass.
In the case of pronouns, the significant difference lies in gender. In Urdu pronouns, there is no distinction between masculine and feminine genders and the same pronoun applies for both ‘he’ and ‘she’, but the distinction falls between proximate and distant in the third person. Both the pronouns have different subject and verb forms, but in the case of the latter, they are called nominative and oblique. Possessive pronouns in Urdu are grammatically adjective and agree with the nouns they qualify. Both languages have attributive and predicative adjectives, but Urdu uses postpositions to make adjectives. Also, the comparative degree of Urdu is relatively straightforward than English.
Adverbs are similar in English and Urdu. However, verbs are the most crucial element in English since they can convey the whole meaning. But in Urdu, it has to be conjugated for tense, number, and gender. Urdu tenses are similar to those used in English: present simple, past continuous, among others. Still, there is a lack of correspondence in their use to express various meanings.
Phrases
In everyday speech, a phrase may refer to any group of words. In linguistics, a phrase is a group of words, or sometimes a single word, which forms a constituent and functions as a single unit in the syntax of a sentence. The English language has different phases: noun phrase, verb phrase, adverbial phrase, and prepositional phrase. On the other hand, the Urdu language has noun, verb, adjective, adverbial, genitive, and prepositional phrases. Furthermore, English is a fixed word order language and follows the SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) structure.
In contrast, Urdu is a free word-order language and follows many possible word orderings, but the most common sentence used by native speakers is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb). Urdu can exercise the free order word phenomenon due to its strong case-marking system, which disambiguates subject or object nouns appearing in the sentence. It also has a postpositional phrase instead of an English prepositional phrase, which differs in how it precedes objects.
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Clauses
In English, a clause is a group of words that contain a subject and a predicate. A subject is someone or something about which we say something, while a predicate is whatever we say about that someone or something. Similarly, in Urdu, a clause is a part of a sentence having a subject and predicate but not a complete sentence on its own. English and Urdu have similar clauses, but the choice of subordinating conjunction is limited in Urdu as opposed to English.
Sentences
At the sentence level, there is a significant difference in the structure of English and Urdu. The basic structure in an English sentence is S-V-O, and Urdu is S-O-V. in other words, the verb in Urdu generally comes last in the sentence, but in English, it comes before the object. Moreover, Urdu typically uses a subjunctive in polite requests, which have the word order of statements rather than questions.
Translation
Early men used to communicate through symbols and signals. With the progression of time, they developed languages to communicate with each other conveniently. Today, English has become the global language. People deem it necessary to master the language to keep up with the ever-progressing world. So, here we come back to English being the co-official language of Pakistan, alongside Urdu.
But still, some people are beginners in learning English or Urdu language. English writing and Urdu writing can be even more challenging for them. Such people often look for English meanings in Urdu, and vice versa, to better understand the words in their local context. So, what could be a better place to find English and Urdu translations? Various online English and Urdu translation tools help translate English words, phrases, or sentences to Urdu and contrariwise. The Urdu and English translation only takes a few seconds and allows the translation of hundreds of characters in one request. While some of this translation is not 100% accurate, you can get the basic idea with a few modifications.
Conclusion
We have compared and contrasted English vs Urdu grammar, a set of structural rules governing the composition of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences in any given natural language. The Urdu lingua franca is grammar somewhat similar to English in various ways. For those looking to translate English to Urdu and vice versa, which includes students, you can use the various online tools to do translations. Students can also use various custom writing services such as CustomWritings.com to assist them with their English assignments.