Ghazalaw & hen benillion

Just caught the tail end on BBC Radio 4 of an interesting programme about ‘Ghazalaw’:

“Ghazal, the love song of Indian Classical music…has met and been enmeshed with a seemingly alien tradition - the anonymous ‘hen benillion’…of rural Wales… ‘Ghazalaw’, a collaboration between Indian and Welsh musicians, searches for affinities between these centuries-old poetic and musical forms, connects the languages of Urdu and Welsh (which both have their roots in Sanskrit”

It seems it’s going to be repeated on Radio 4 at 15:30 on Sat 9, and I guess may be available shortly on BBC iPlayer (with apologies to those outside the UK who can’t access either, but there are some details here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06trys2 and a quick web search found this: http://www.ghazalaw.com/about/)

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The radio iPlayer is available across the world, with restrictions such the great firewalls of China and North Korea.

I hate to correct the BBC (actually, to be truthful, I take great pleasure in it!), but Urdu and Welsh do not “both have their roots in Sanskrit”. Urdu does, certainly, but Welsh does not.

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Yeah, I don’t like it when these programs push wrong information. They could have made it accurate by going back further and saying Proto Indo-European.

Yup. I think that’s what they meant.