Legal & Bureaucratic Vocabulary

Fossilized legal words: ledit, nonobstant, sous réserve de — Hindi has its own fossilized legalese too

Legal and administrative French preserves a handful of words that have essentially died out everywhere else — ledit/ladite ('the aforementioned') and nonobstant ('notwithstanding') function almost like fossils, existing only in this one register. Hindi legal and bureaucratic writing does the identical thing with its own heavily Sanskritized vocabulary: उपर्युक्त ('the above-mentioned') and तथापि appear constantly in government forms and legal documents but essentially never in ordinary spoken Hindi. Recognizing both sets as fixed formulas belonging to a single register, not vocabulary to sprinkle into everyday writing, will keep your own French from sounding oddly archaic outside a legal context — the same caution you'd already apply to उपर्युक्त in casual Hindi conversation.