Musicking Bodies: Gesture and Voice in Hindustani Music

A Note on Languages and Terminology

xvii A Note on Languages and Terminology Many of the technical terms in this book are borrowed from the HindiUrdu lexicon of Hindustani music. Hindi and Urdu are mutually intelligible to such an extent that they can be considered a single language, and their grammatical flexibility has allowed an easy flow of loan words from Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Portuguese, and English. Thus musical terms are spelled variously in various scripts (Devanagari, Roman, Bengali, Tamil, Persian , etc.) and in many cases are even pronounced differently. My aim has been to smoothly integrate these terms into English prose alongside Indic words such as jungle and guru, just as once-foreign words such as chai and sitar have been smoothly adapted into Indic languages. Thus these words are italicized only when they first appear, or in extensive translation from Hindi-Urdu. The English plural suffix -s has likewise been used instead of Indic plural forms. For ease of reading, I have generally tried to avoid the prefixes Ustad, Pandit, and Doctor for musicians and scholars. In the main text of this book, I have used nondiacritical Latin transliterations of Indic words that are widely known and, I hope, intuitive for both native speakers of Hindi-Urdu and readers with no background in Indic languages. In most cases, the context should leave little doubt about the word in question—for example, whether kala is kalaa (art) or kaalaa (black). The precise pronunciations of Indic terms and proper names, indicated with diacritics and their equivalents in Devanagari and Urdu scripts, can be found in the glossary, alongside technical terms from gesture studies and other fields. This page intentionally left blank Musicking Bodies This page intentionally left blank ...