Michael Everson wrote:
> Um, my understanding is that the "Hindustani" language (so called
> "Hindoostani" by the British way back when) is really fairly uniform, apart
> from the alphabet it is written (Arabic by Muslims, Nagari by Hindus, to
> use the sectarian taxonomy), and the fact that for much of the higher
> terminology, Urdu tends to borrow from Arabic and Hindi tends to borrow
> from Sanskrit. You may mean that "as a written language" Urdu predates
> Hindi.
It's also the case that the *name* Urdu ("camp language") is much
older.
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