Baahar vs Baahir

A cricket forum stopped talking cricket to argue about one vowel. Seven years later, everyone was still right.

In December 2011, on a Pakistani cricket forum, a fan posted a question with no cricket in it: is the word for outside baahar or baahir? He remembered Salman Khan teasing Veena Malik on television for saying baahir. The thread he started ran, on and off, for seven years, which is longer than many Test careers.

The room split. Lahore and Karachi posters lined up behind baahar. A London member said baahir; another protested that his entire family says baahir, or really something closer to baaher. And one Lahori filed the verdict that baahir belongs to people new to Urdu or new to money, which is the kind of sentence that says more about the speaker than about the word.

Two genuinely sharp observations surfaced. First, a poster untangled a lookalike pair: baahar with the long first vowel is outside, bahaar with the long second vowel is spring, two different words in similar romanized clothing. Second, a latecomer confessed that he says baahar in conversation but reads the written word aloud as baahir, and could not explain why. The page suggests one vowel; the mouth keeps its own counsel.

Nobody in seven years opened a dictionary, which is a shame, because the dictionaries would have ended the argument by refusing to pick a side: Platts recorded both baahar and baahir in 1884. This is the same small vowel drift that gave Zubane its name. Read Zubaan vs Zabaan for its cousin, and judge nobody for either.