ABSTRACT
Panjabi is claimed to be a “phonetic language”. This claim is then explained as “In Panjabi, you write exactly as you speak and speak exactly as you write.” But this claim is wrong on two counts – (i) A language must not be confused with the script used for writing it; no language is “phonetic”; only a writing system may be so in the sense that there is “one to one correspondence” between its symbols and the phonemes (distinctive sounds) of the language it is used for, and (ii) the Panjabi writing system is not perfectly “phonetic” even in this sense. In this chapter we study only the native Panjabi script known as Gurmukhi used for writing Panjabi in India and by the Panjabi people of Indian origin living outside India. In Pakistan, Panjabi is written in a modified form of the Arabic script known as Shahmukhi. For reasons of space, and also for reasons mentioned in the Preface and Chapter 18, Shahmukhi is not included in the main body of this book.
