Why the language debate is unending, unrelenting, emotive and
yet very meaningful?
I have many more
points to make as I can read, write and speak in some 3 European languages and
know to read and understand a bit two more European languages. Besides I did my
entire schooling in my mother tongue Tamil. Sanskrit is a language I love and I
got the university second mark in that and thanks to my sister I learned a bit
of Hindi she is a Hindi pandit. Thanks to Saint Tyagaraja’s kritis I can
understand very chaste Telugu which unfortunately very few speak.
Besides I have read and
can quote from some 100 best books and authors on linguistics, not only those
who have written purely academic stuff but more so very interesting books by those who have made in depth observation and
research on how languages are used and how they use, make, modify, motivate, maneuver
, manipulate and do many more things to the mind and thinking process itself
with the help of /hype of many wonderful expressions, intricate usages, sublime
suggestions [as used in religious business] , sensuously enticing usages [ as
used in business promotion advertisements], surreptitious intentions [as
used in political brain washing techniques] and many more subtle aspects of
many languages.
As with any other
subject languages too are, and preferably must be, analyzed from two extreme
ends of the pendulums and all our debates, discussions and discernment swing
between these two extreme points they are:-
1] Very close to
everyone’s heart purely subjective, passion filled [sometimes even with a tinge
of fanatical affinity] with an ethnocentric and cultural affinity influenced
and impacted by several generations of association and enhanced by ideological
indoctrination promoted with a proportionately pleasant bunch of literature and
philosophy, symbols imbued with extraordinarily valued and sometimes venerated
substance because of the knowledge and perception of the significance of the
concepts hidden beneath or manifested by those symbols a sort of magical lens
that reveals what eludes the normal outside observer or a prism that unravels a
kaleidoscopic splendor of patterns and colors etc.
2] Very objective,
prosaic analysis in terms the inherent value of the subject [[here language] under
scrutiny with reference to its utility, value for survival, significance to
life of humanity especially the functional aspects of life etc.
Both are right and
wrong because both are relative and being an umpire here is as unpleasant or an
uneasy task as being an adjudicator in an argument between a mother and wife.[
[if you view it subjectively] or between a mother-in –law and daughter in law
[if you view it quasi subjectively] or between two women of different ages with
different relationships to you [if you are very objective].
For example the syntax
of a sentence describing the beauty and importance of eyes is very objective
and precise to the point when it is used to advertise a product or lens or
spectacles for the eyes but the very same description of the beauty and impact
of the beauty of the eyes wanders into very poetic and romantic realms throwing
all rules of grammar /syntax to the winds when describing a lover’s beautiful
eyes.
So the language
debates will always be reasonable, could be recreational, relevant [ for
various reasons] and reverberating with vigour.
As per the great
linguistic scholar Steven Pinker in his wonderful book one of the trio logy
‘THE STUFF OF THOUGHT-LANGUAGE AS A WINDOW INTO THE HUMAN NATURE’ writes
“language itself is not a single system but a contraption with many
components…….syntax itself encompasses several mechanisms, which are tapped to different
extents by different languages……one of the key phenomenon of syntax is the way
that sentences are built around their verbs. The phenomenon goes by many
technical names [including subcategorization, diathesis, predicate argument
structure, valence, adicity [roots thus mark points of interface between the
language faculty and the wider cognitive makeup of a person], arity [the number of arguments that a function can take] ,
case structure, and theta-role assignment], but I’ll refer to it using traditional
term verb
constructions.”
He also goes on to
write , “For example, pour, fill and load are all ways of
moving something somewhere, and they all have the same cast of characters: a
mover, some contents that move, and a container that is the goal of the
movement. Yet pour allows only the content -locative [pour water], fill
allows only the container –locative [fill the glass], and load goes both ways [load
the hay, load the wagon]”
A book by the linguist
Beth Levin classifies three thousand English
verbs into about eighty-five classes they appear in; its subtitles is ‘A
preliminary Investigation’
But due to want of
time and space I am not going into the details and as suggested by many well
meaning, experienced and erudite persons in this long drawn discussion on
English versus Hindi debate I am more comfortable and convinced with English
for various reasons which you may find in the links below.
One must also read David Crystal on language studies
besides Vygotsky the much neglected great linguist whose only mistake was being
born in Communist Russia during cold war period
No comments:
Post a Comment