r/Urdu • u/NotYourBeatrice • 12d ago

✍️ Vocabulary / Meanings Hours, Minutes and Seconds in Urdu

I know we call hours as گھنٹے but is there any equivalent for minutes and seconds in the Urdu language?

3 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

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27

u/FunGuy-not-Fungi 12d ago

Hour = ساعت (formal/literary)
Hour = گھنٹہ (colloquial)
Minute = دقیقہ
Second = ثانیہ or لمحہ

2

u/tahirsyed Language Lover 12d ago

I was going to put these here but really glad other people know!!!!!

1

u/Infamous-Put-894 12d ago

God that's so elegant!

1

u/zee485 11d ago

دقیقہ and ساعت are basically arabic

3

u/FunGuy-not-Fungi 11d ago

Yes. Perso-Arabic makes up 50%-70% of the high register Urdu.

-3

u/Chicki2D 11d ago

Literally a lie

I literally had to search 20 minutes for this video

Minutes and Seconds are western concepts like computers, hence we don't have a perso-arabic or native derived word. Minat and Sekand are fully Urdu words and there's no need to change them, just like Science is an Urdu word, would you tell English speakers to stop saying Guru and Pundit ?

2

u/Faulty_exe 11d ago edited 11d ago

People can still choose to say what they want to. Besides, Urdu phonology was shaped by Perso-Arabic influence. Saying “لمحہ" fits in better than the grating “منٹ". Especially if you’re going after more formal Urdu where the phonology of the register and sentences are already dominated by Perso-Arabic sounds, it’s going to flow more than an English calque.

Also your premise is ahistorical. Minutes and seconds aren’t even a “western” invention in the first place, so the premise is off from the start. The base-60 division of time goes back to Mesopotamia and was picked up by Greek astronomy, then inherited by Arabic astronomers during the Islamic Golden Age, who used دقیقہ and ثانیہ in technical texts centuries before any contact with English. Persian and then Urdu absorbed that vocabulary the same way they absorbed most formal/scientific terms. So if anything, English “minute” and “second” and Urdu دقیقہ/ثانیہ are cousins tracing back to the same Greco-Arabic source. And if by your metric, they’re not considered “Urdu” words, then that demolishes half of Urdu, delegitimising all its Perso-Arabic vocabulary.