Change the Discussion to Living and Surviving Languages

                                              Change the Discussion to Living and Surviving Languages

This write-up, which I hope would not be too long, does not take reference to any recent particular verbal duels between politicians. It is rather about changing the parameters of the discussion; please note that I used “discussion” instead of “debate” or “argument”, as I do not want anyone going away having arrived at a definitive conclusion.

Any language dies only when there is a maximum of one person who can do something with it, but has no one else to do it with. When that person dies without leaving a progeny (which is no guarantee the language would survive), the language dies. This, I believe, is an uncontroversial position, though even this is not definitive. As we have multiple venues of reproductions of thoughts, a language can be resurrected. Yet, such a resurrected language may not be said to be the language it was before it died. Time stops for nobody, and all that.

A surviving language; there are many, like Latin, Sanskrit etc. merely survive. That is not an analytic statement if you follow how I define “survival”. This is what Baruch Spinoza did as he wandered in the philosophical terrain: define a word before using it and, this is crucial, his definition matched how he wanted to develop his theses and hardly ever matched how others had defined it earlier.

Survival of a language, I take it to mean, as not changing substantively to have an effect on understanding anything spoken, written in it. I am no linguist, but I would go out on a limb and say that Latin is at best a surviving language. No one ever takes an effort to make it living, the essence of which is to change. Latin never changes. Perhaps someone might want to extend the point to Sanskrit.

A living language, again, as I define it, is one that resists, but not with any conviction, changes. Yet, it changes. Take Tamil, for example. Some Tamils think through the language to come up with words that have no shelf life (though a Tamil by birth, I am not one of them). “Bus” is a word in English and its equivalent in Tamil was coined as “Perundu” in the late 1960s, which could mean something big that pushes (perhaps the etymology of “undu” could give me a more relevant word to carry the meaning of a bus). There are enough examples.

The word bus in a “bus bar” in an electric substation means carrying a large quantity of electricity (power) with minimal resistance.     Now, that matches the meaning of the word “bus” as regards transportation. I hope you get my point.

To get back to “bus” and “perundu”, try using the latter at a bus stop and observe how people look at you – You must be from Mars!

My conclusion is if a word in another language can be relatively easily pronounced and written by a mass of people who use that word in their daily interactions in their vernacular (no disdain, only to mean the marketplace), then that marks a living language, vernacular or otherwise. Both the vernacular and the literary forms of a language should be able to thrive in a dynamic environment; a living environment fit for a living language.

Further, French language does not easily accept words from another language. I might say that it is closer to surviving than to living.

Raghuram Ekambaram