اُردو قواعد کے مستشرق قواعد نگار Oriental grammarians In Urdu literature Section Urdu Literature

Abstract

The strange thing about grammar is that the native speakers of a language do not need it, at least while learning it as a child. Native speakers instinctively know the rules that govern the use of their language and speak it right from early childhood without bothering to know what a noun or verb is and how to inflect it. It is the foreigners and non-native speakers who need grammar the most. This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why the earliest books on grammar of Urdu were written by foreigners — in Dutch, Latin, English, French, German and Italian. The Europeans who wrote Urdu’s early grammar did not call it Urdu but Hindustani or Hindustan or even Moors, a word originally used for North African Muslims in Medieval Europe, as they wrongly believed that Urdu was the language of Muslims alone.