The rich treasure of Indian languages

Speaking of the country as a whole, and continuing in the context of pronunciation, the treatment meted out to the three varieties of 's', and 'sh' is worth noting. While the south Indian tongues make a clear distinction between the three sounds (while pronouncing the words such as Sangh, Viswa and Vishnu, for example), the North Indian languages are quite happy with using just the 's' and 'sh' leaving out the sibilant 's' altogether.

Some other interesting features present themselves as one hears English being spoken by people from different regions of the country. The Telugu language, for instance, has letters in the alphabet which stand for 'v' and 'o'. Still it is common to find 'vote' being pronounced as 'oat' and 'over' as 'vover'. They also pronounce the vowel in 'paper' as the vowel in 'twang' and the vowel in 'young' as the vowel in 'end', and, quite to the contrary, the first vowel in 'every' as the vowel in 'yeast'. The Telugus are also prone to pronounce 'Navy' with the vowel sounding as in 'man' while the Punjabis pronounce the first vowel in 'next' as the vowel in 'cat' They are similarly likely to pronounce 'treasure' with the consonant sounding as its counterpart in 'voyeur'. The Gujaratis pronounce the vowel in 'bag' as the vowel in 'make'. People from the north Indian States, are likely to say 'circumistances' for 'circumstances'. Tamil and Malayalam often interchange the pronunciation of K with G. Thus, 'Planning Commission' is likely to sound like 'Planningommission'.

Quite apart from all this, there are languages spoken in parts of Africa known as 'clicking languages'. The sounds that is made are known as 'phonemes'. The clicks function as normal consonants and make a distinctive sound from the mouth of the speaker as there are articulated by suction mechanism bringing about a quack popping sound between the tongue of a speaker and the roof of the mouth.

The first time I heard such a language spoken was when Rajmohan Gandhi led a group from the Moral Re-armament (MRA) movement and performed a medley of events at our college.

These languages were originally unique to the Khoisan group, and have subsequently spread to other languages of the Cushitic and Bantu groups.

Studies have estimated that anywhere between 50 to 90% of the languages currently spoken in the world will probably have become extinct by year 2100.

Literal translation, as from one language to another, can sometimes produce funny, if not absurd, results. For instance, the word 'Kondala' in Telugu means mountains, and of the word 'rao' means 'will not come'. Now, Kondala Rao is a common name in Telugu but, when literally translated, will mean that his name stands for "mountains will not come!"

There are other instances of such translations, especially from Hindi to Telugu and vice versa. For instance, the word 'vichar' in Hindi stands for an 'idea', while it means sorrow' in Telugu. Similarly, 'anumaan' in Hindi stands for an 'estimate' while, in Telugu, it stands for 'suspicion'.

The use of uncommon, or extremely complicated, expressions, and words, can sometimes cloud the intention to be conveyed by a sentence. I recall a very amusing incident related in the book 'Yes Minister'. Sir Humphrey Appleby, the Cabinet Secretary makes a statement in a Cabinet meeting which is so abstruse and incomprehensible, that a Minister attending that meeting remarks that he wished he had English to English translation as in the United Nations!

The absurdities and internal contradictions of the English language, in pronunciation, grammar, spelling and syntax, frustrated George Bernard Shaw so much that he left a legacy to fund the effort of putting in place a new international language – lingua franca. As an illustration, he cited the example of the word 'GHOTI' which, when pronunciations are borrowed from the words function (f), women (i) and wish (sh), would read as 'Fish'!

The Shavian alphabet (also known as the Shaw alphabet) is an alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonetic orthography for the English language to replace the difficulties of conventional spelling.

At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, may I take the liberty of recalling a historical fact, namely, that Krishna Deva Raya who presided over a multilingual empire, while penning his legendary 'Aamukthamalyada' said in his introduction to that work that he was a king of the Telugu people which language according to him was the best in the country! What is more, to lend credence to his statement, he told the readers that Lord Mahavishnu of Srikakulam (in what is called Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh State today), appeared in his dream and said that!

And many of us have heard Oscar Wilde describing America and England as two countries "separated by the same language"!

And, strange as this may seem many of the readers, Hindi, in the strictest technical sense, is not a language at all! Many dialects including Khadi Boli, Maithili and Bhojpuri are the sources in which the roots of Hindi lie historically.

But that is not to take away from the versatile and universally acceptable language Hindi has developed into. True, decades ago, there was a little resistance to its apparent imposition from some parts of the country. Mercifully, that is no longer so. In fact, distinguished scholars from the South Indian States have not only achieved high academic distinction in the language but have also written books which are highly regarded in academic circles. The name of Yarlagadda Lakshmi Prasad springs to mind in this context. Hindi now has strong roots in the psyche of the country as the national language with a distinctive identity of its own. Having said all that, I occasionally do wonder why such a carefully nurtured process of development of a relatively recent language or a language of relatively recent origin failed to find a word for the English word 'minute'!

Finally, to round off this discussion about languages, recorded history tells us that, as a matter of fact, Khari Boli was the language of the northern parts of India in the days of yore. And, it did not have a script. Also, 'north' at that time, meant an area covering what are Pakistan, Afghanistan etc., of today. Over time, as the Aryan invasion of India happened, the Persian and Arabic scripts became the medium in which Khari Boli was written. It was only much later that Devanagari became its script for the Hindu section of the population of those areas. Later on, during the days of the British rule, an organisation called the 'Nagari Prachar Sabha' has to be launched, to restore to the Hindus the right to use the Devanagari script in formal for a such as courts of Law etc. So, it was really a question of one language with two scripts which, today, has manifested themselves into two, namely, Hindi and Urdu!

(The writer is former Chief Secretary, Government of Dr Mohan KandaAndhra Pradesh)