Characteristics of a Living Language

 

Characteristics of a Living Language

This has become a big issue among the chattering classes–those who hold forth as self-appointed experts on philosophy, religion, language, education, environment, governance (not politics) ... I am not exactly proud of belonging to any one of them, as each demands fealty to it and each is in an isolated silo.

Therefore, I prefer to be a chattering class of one, in all the above mentioned and not mentioned topics, one at a time. Today my avatar is as a language maven, particularly in a living language.

The current fashion is to present as proof the number of people who can speak the language under consideration, must be at least a village population. So, English (a mongrel; you can find enough words whose roots are in German, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Old English, and mixtures of these) is a living language. Spanish is one, beyond Spain, in many South American countries, Brazil excluded, and considering it has good sized pockets in the US too.

Any language of colonial/imperialist power is a living language, unless the native populations are truly exterminated. The language of Native Americans who still exist is a living language. Hindi too is one. With a little lower legitimacy (merely on account of the metric) are Marathi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Malayalam and so on; to be official and brief about it, all the languages recognised by the Constitution of India.

Is the above a valid metric? I think not. So, you ask in what other way would you distinguish, by their grammar? You have smug smirk with an implicit “Gotcha!”on your face, I see. I will wipe that smile off your face in double quick time. Did African drum sounds have grammar? If yes, try putting it in words. You will twist yourselves so badly even a pretzel would look straight. One drummer of a native African (before it was called Africa) conveyed his message to another perhaps 100 meters away and the receiver knew what the message was! Why, even now should someone in the drum section misses a beat, the audience will know. How? Because, the drum beats do have a grammar. If you have difficulty accepting, let me ask you about telegraph and Morse Code, of dots and dashes! Does Jazz have a grammar? I don’t know.

Does the extent of vocabulary matter? I do not think so. This comes out of what my brother asserts – language is only for communication; grammar, poetics, vocabulary etc. be damned. It is difficult for me either to accept or reject his contention. I have heard of aboriginals in Amazon who lived (at least till about 20 years ago, when I read about them) who limited their counting only to two! If there is more of anything, all of them came under, “many”! And, they lived as we do, not merely survived, as fully, in their own way, including fish-hunting; successfully spearing fish in a flowing river! You fishing enthusiasts, try that.

For a language to be living, it has to evolve; meaning, change. And, this change has to be imperceptibly gradual. Otherwise, people would tag the new forms/words etc. a new language. The old remains, and the new grows old over time, when things change gradually.

One of my friends did his schooling at Lawrence School, Lovedale. He appeared to be an ardent Tamil chauvinist, quite a surprise to his informal acolytes, me included. In Madras (it was not yet Chennai), he wanted to buy pineapple and asked the vendor whether he had any. The problem was he named the fruit in tongue-twisting Tamil, a word that did not sound a “natural” Tamil word (if a word can be differentiated in this manner), no simple “Pineapple” for him. Fruit vendors in Madras looked at him as strange, which he was, given the milieu.

My friend forgot that a language does not become living if you are looking at it in the old way. I can try to understand Thirukkural (which I had studied in a Tamil medium high school) and fail; this, let me emphasize, is no insult to my mother tongue, Tamil or if you like, Tamizh. I am OK with either though my preference slants towards the latter.

The gives me the necessary handle to say what I did want to say in this post. How about Sanskrit? My wife throws the following factotum in my face when this topic is broached. She says, and I take this at her word, that there indeed is a village in which the occupants speak only Sanskrit.

Let us move to France, far left of Europe, geographically and on the Mercator projection of a flat world. Even the academy for French language has reckoned that it is time now (for some time) for it to exit the stage. After four and half centuries or thereabouts, one can be free in Anglicizing French through loan words. Americans own Great Britain! It would be rather Americanese than English.

That is the global reality. He who has the power tells the world what to do. For example, though Donald J. Trump may hold many Americans in thrall, he is finding it difficult to get the world to listen to him, on Panama Canal, on Greenland; I wonder why he has not gone after Australia.

There is something about Australia that makes it more like Greenland. The concentration of population around the periphery, and inland almost uninhabited. Am I giving him ideas? Yes, and Adani would like that, the promoter for the mining and railway project, the Carmel.

DJT would not mind as he would poach on Adani, though the latter is richer and has friends all over that DJT lacks, beyond the shores of the US!

Coming back to Sanskrit, if it sticks to its assertion that the sounds of its chants (mantras) are what give them the power and therefore the words that create the chants cannot be changed, and moreover it would be undivine to create sounds for the new words, it is on a wet slope to obscurity at best and obliteration, at worst unless Gods Themselves (a title of one of Isaac Asimov’s stories, a fabulous one!) intervene.

Hence, I request Sanskrit aficionados to look wider and give a more solid reason for promoting the language. The language does not stand a chance on population count, it is not the language of a colonial/imperialist power (though it resorted to social domination in its original incarnation), its grammar, though it has fewer exceptions than any other language (as claimed by the cognoscenti), has no hold on the populace, it cannot hope to become the dominant player in everyday life of the people, and, this is crucial, its guardians are opposed to the language evolving! Finally, if Sanskrit has to evolve, it can do so only if it discards its focus on the sound and evolves in the written form.

That is the suggestion from this non-Sanskritic, non-linguist, deaf-in-one ear, non-expert!

Raghuram Ekambaram