Common Hindi and Urdu words used in courts

LUG-105 English and Legal Language, Unit V: Common Hindi and Urdu words used in courts. · LLB · 60 min

The Supreme Court and the High Courts work in English, but the trial courts of Uttarakhand and the other Hindi States record everything in Hindi, and the words spoken there every day - vakalatnama, halafnama, zamanat, peshi, jirah, faisla - are mostly Persian and Arabic, inherited from the Mughal and Company courts, standing beside the Sanskrit-based terms of the official Hindi texts of the Acts. This lecture gives the court vocabulary as a table of about a hundred words with origin, meaning and the exact English legal term, shows how to read a trial-court order, and explains why every legal professional must command both vocabularies. The second lecture of this unit covers translation itself (topic 1).

Objectives

Explain why the Indian courts use three layers of language - English, Sanskritised Hindi and Perso-Arabic court Urdu - and where each layer comes from.
Give the meaning, origin and English legal equivalent of the common Hindi and Urdu words used in court proceedings.
Read a Hindi trial-court order sheet and render it correctly in English.
Answer the examiner's questions on 'words used in courts' in the tabular form that scores full marks.

Slides

Three languages in one courtroom
Where the court words come from: Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, English
Table A: the court and its people
Table B: the suit, the pleadings and the documents
Table C: proceedings, evidence and orders
Table D: statute, crime, property and revenue words
Word families and the examiner's three words
Why a legal professional must know these words
Reading a trial-court order: a worked example
How the examiner asks it

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