Further Etymological & Linguistic Ventures

Ya {یا} is simply put ya. None of us have ever paid much attention to it just as one doesn’t pay any attention to and or well… or. To answer your question, in Urdu, ya is used both ways, after all, as anyone would hope to tell you, Urdu exists as the not-so-secret love-child of an orgy involving Arabic, Persian, Hindi/Sanskrit, and Turkish. As such it borrows and uses words from all of those different languages which can make it harder to narrow down the origin of each specific word. The term ya itself seems to have entered into the Urdu language twice. Once in its original Arabic and second in its later Persian form. In Arabic, ya {يَا} is a word of addressing that can mean “hey, you, O!, or Oh!”. Meanwhile in Persian, ya {یا} too was understood in two forms. First was this Arabic usage that made its way to Persian-influenced areas. Secondly, there was an inherited term from Middle Persian that shows up in no record of Old Persian. This was rendered as ʾywp in Middle Persian, ʾyʾb in the Manichaean script (in words such as /ayāb⁠/), and is held to be cognate with the Parthian ʾgʾm (such as in /āgām⁠/). It was this ya that meant “or” or “either”, and it too made its way not only to Urdu but also to various Arabic dialects. To summarize the timeline: <a href="https://medium.com/@miainsel2/further-etymological-linguistic-ventures-93ba1e083be3">Visit Now</a>