I was reading Harry Potter in Urdu where the students are crowding into the small room preparatory to going into the Great Hall for the Sorting Hat ceremony. I read the word spelled bh-long vowel e or I – R. bheR means ‘sheep’, so it kind of fit the context, herded in like sheep, but I was skeptical and so asked my guru. He said it was a crowd. Well, yes, they were crowded in but what did that have to do with sheep other than the analogy to sheep? No, it’s not that. He struggled to explain. So I looked it up in a large dictionary I had fortunately brought and it gave bheR = sheep and bhiR = crowed. Problem solved. It’s a glitch in the writing system where e and i can be distinguished only with special diacritics which are often not used and not in this case.
Pat’s Polemics
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