Cultural archaeology of South Asian languages in a linguistic area

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Cultural archaeology of South Asian languages in a linguistic area

Posted by: "k" kalyan97 kalyan97

Sat Aug 19, 2006 8:54 pm (PST)

Trials, tribulations & triumph of a cultural archeaologist pt I&II

 

V SUNDARAM, 16 and 17 August 2006, NewsToday

 

Barbara Tuchman, the great American woman historian rightly

observes: Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books

history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and

speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of

civilisation would have been impossible. They are agents of change,

windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They

are

companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the

mind.

Books are humanity in print.

 

These instructive and inspiring words are wholly applicable to

'AN ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF SOUTH ASIAN LANGUAGES' by Dr S

Kalyanaraman and published by Asian Development Bank, Manila,

Philippines. In more senses than one this is a landmark book in the

world of languages, linguistics and culture. This book is a

Multilanguage historical and cultural dictionary of South Asia; it is

a lexicon; it is an encyclopaedia. To quote his own words: This is a

comparative dictionary covering all the languages of South Asia

(which

may also be referred to, in a geographical/historical sense as the

Indian sub-continent ). This dictionary seeks to establish a semantic

concordance, across the languages of numeraire facile of the South

Asian sub-continent : from Brahui to Santali to Bengali, from

Kashmiri

to Mundarica to Sinhalece, from Marathi to Hindi to Nepali, from

Sindhi or Panjabi or Urdu to Tamil. A semantic structure binds the

languages of South Asia, which may have diverged morphologically or

phonologically as evidenced in the oral tradition of Vedic texts, or

epigraphy, literary works or lexicons of the historical periods. This

dictionary, therefore goes beyond, the commonly held belief of an

Indo-European language and is anchored on proto-South Asian sememes.

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Dr S Kalyanaraman The great pioneering Indologist Sir William

Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1783, pronounced

with authority the underlying genetic relationship between the

classical languages, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit in his third Annual

Discourse to the Asiatic Society of Bengal on the History and Culture

of the Hindus in February 1786 when he made the following epoch-

making

observation: The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of

a

wonderful structure : more perfect than the Greek, more copious than

the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to

both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in

the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by

accident, so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all

three, without believing them to have sprung from a common source,

which perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though

not

quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic,

though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with

the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.

 

Long before Sir William Jones in 1786, the 16th century

Italian scholar Sassetti apparently studied Sanskrit calling it 'a

pleasant musical language' and uniting Deo with Deva. In the 17th

century, the Dutch protestant missionary, Abraham Rogerius, published

in 1651 the translation of Bhartrihari in Europe for the first time.

So we find many Catholic missionaries of South India, French and

Belgian, studying a little Sanskrit, and mixing with Tamil, producing

the faked Ezour Vedam , the target of Voltaire's criticism; and

Anquitil du Perron, visiting India before Sir William Jones, provoked

the latter's sarcastic criticism of premature handling of Sanskrit

texts. As early as 1725 we find the German missionary (translator of

the Bible into Tamil) Benjamin Schultze emphasising the similarity

between the numerals of Sanskrit, German and Latin.

 

Another remarkable Englishman, Horne Tooke, in his 'Diversions

of Purley ' in 1786 anticipated Bopp and other pioneers of

Comparative

Grammar. The German traveller, Pallas, worked out the project of the

mathematician-philopher Leibniz (1646 - 1716) and published

'Comparative Vocabularies of all the Languages of the World' in 1787.

This uncritical work was soon superseded by the German

grammarian-philosopher Adelung's Mithridates or General Science of

Languages, published in four volumes between 1806 and 1817.

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Dr S Kalyanaraman legitimately belongs to this great tradition

of philologists and lexicographers, dictionary-compilers,

etymologists, scholars and savants. He has compiled this unique,

multilingual dictionary of the Dravidian, Arian and Mundarica

language

families which he took 18 years to complete. It has been published in

three volumes, running to over 2000 pages with nearly 5 lakh words

from over 25 ancient languages. This work covers over 8000 semantic

clusters which span and bind the South Asian Languages. The basic

finding is that thousands of terms of the Vedas, the Munda languages

(eg.Santali, Mundarica, Sora), the so-called Dravidian languages and

the so-called Indo-Aryan languages have common roots. This dictionary

called Indian Lexicon has also been made available on the internet.

He

declares with humility: The author assumes full responsibility for

the

semantic and etymological judgements made and the errors that might

have crept in with thousands of database iterations in organizing the

semantic clusters found in the word lists (the lexicon includes over

half-a-million Indian words). The author hopes that with the

impossibility of 'dating' the origin of a word, all its inherent

limitations, the omissions, intentional or otherwise and errors that

will in due course be pointed out by scholars specialized in their

fields, the Indian Lexicon will be a tentative, but bold start of a

skeleton dictionary of the Indian linguistic area ca. 3000 B.C. and

will be expanded further to include modern words.

 

Dr S Kalyanaraman was born on 20 October 1939. His mother

tongue is Tamil. But all his school and under graduate education was

in Telugu and Sanskrit in Andhra Pradesh. He is conversant with

Tamil,

Telugu, Kannada, Hindi and Sanskrit languages. He graduated from

Annamalai University in Economics and Statistics. He has a Doctorate

in Public Administration from the University of the Philippines and

his thesis Public Administration in Asia, a comparative study of

development administration in six Asian countries: India, Bangladesh,

Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia and Philippines. He joined the Asian

Development bank in 1978. Earlier he was a Member of the Indian

Railway Accounts Service from 1962.

 

During the last 11 years, starting from 1995, he has been

working on Sarasvati River Research Project through his Sarasvati

Sindhu Research Centre in Chennai. Ever since his return to India in

1995 and his presentation of a paper in the 10th World Sanskrit

Conference on his research findings, he has devoted himself to

promoting projects for the revival of the Sarasvati River.

 

Apart from the massive multilingual dictionary of South Asian

languages, Dr Kalyanaraman has also authored several volumes on

Sarasvati Culture and Civilisation. His other notable work is Indian

Alchemy: Soma in the Veda. He has also contributed to Professor

Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya's multi-volume work on History of Science

and Technology in Ancient India

 

To return to Dr Kalyanaraman's Multilingual Etymological

Dictionary of South Asian languages once again. The history of

civilization is more than a tally of our dynasties, governments,

wars,

class struggles and cultural movements. Dr Kalyanaraman proves

through

this book that it is also the story of how human beings in the South

Asian Region have learned to develop and operate systems of reference

and information retrieval that are external to the brain. According

to

current estimates, Homo has been in existence for about 2 million

years, although it may not have become Sapiens till around 100,000

years ago. If this estimate is reliable, then for 99.75% of the

existence of the species Homo and for some 95% of the time that it

has

been Sapiens, there were no external systems at all. The brain with

its erratic memory was the only apparatus available for knowing,

referring and recording and that was the natural state of things. The

bulk of our ancestors would have found anything else unimaginable,

and

for some aboriginal peoples today, in remote areas, this statement

still holds true.

 

This Etymological Dictionary clearly brings out the fact that

language in the region which Dr Kalyanaraman has covered has been the

master tool which man, in his endless adventure after knowledge and

power, has shaped for himself, and which, in its turn, has shaped the

human mind as we see it and know it. It has continuously extended and

conserved the store of knowledge upon which mankind has drawn. It has

furnished the starting point of all our science. In this context the

great words of L.S.Amery come to my mind: 'Language has been the

instrument of social cohesion and of moral law, and through it human

society has developed and found itself. Language, indeed, has been

the

soul of mankind'.

 

We learn from Dr.Kayanaraman's Himalayan effort that language

is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and

anonymous works of unconscious generations. Language exists to

communicate whatever it can communicate. Language is itself the

collective art of _expression, a summary of thousands upon thousands

of

individual intuitions. George Steiner in his great work Language and

Silence observed: 'Languages code immemorial reflexes and twists of

feeling, remembrances of action that transcend individual recall,

contours of communal experience as subtly decisive as the contours of

sky and land in which a civilization ripens. Any outsider can master

a

language as a rider masters his mount; he rarely becomes as one with

its undefined, subterranean motion'. Eros and Language mesh at every

point. Intercourse and discourse, copula and copulation, are

sub-classes of the dominant fact of communication'.

 

As a learned and dedicated etymologist, Dr Kalyanaraman finds

the deadest word in the South Asian Region to have been once a

brilliant picture. We are delighted to learn at his feet that every

language is indeed fossil poetry.

 

'One goes to the potter for pots, but not to the grammarian for

words.

Language is already there among the people'

 

-Patanjali in Mahabhashya

 

In his historic work 'AN ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF SOUTH

ASIAN LANGUAGES', published by Asian Development Bank, Manila,

Philippines, Dr S Kalyanaraman states: 'In philology, as in

archaeology, the search for 'truth' is an extension of a researcher's

imagination. Imagination is not an act of faith, but a statement of

hypothesis based on relational entities in linguistic structures

identified through painstaking lexical work. Two such entities in

linguistic structures are: morpheme and sememe which bind an

etymological group. Sememe may be defined as a phoneme imbued with

'meaning'. Morpheme is defined as a 'meaningful' linguistic unit.

Sememe constitutes the semantic substratum of a morpheme or simply,

'meaning'. What is 'meaning'? It is a concept closely linked to a

social compact for inter-personal communication. The 'private

language' of a speaker's brain (with 'personal' experiences embedded

in neutral networks) is revealed through sounds uttered by the

speaker. Language is formed if these uttered sounds echo the 'private

language' of a listener. Such an echo constitutes meaning or the

semantic sub-structure of a language. Sememes are the basic semantic

structural units of a language which combine to yield morphemes or

words. A sememe can, for example, be distinguished from a phoneme or

a

gesture which does not communicate a message in a social compact.

Only

those uttered sounds which are heard and accepted in a social compact

can constitute the repertoire of a language. Sememes (or,

dhatupada' )

are given a variety of phonemic and morphological forms in the lingua

franca to constitute semantic expressions, or the vocabulary of an

evolving and growing civilization'.

 

Ramana Maharishi asked the question: 'Who am I?' Likewise Dr S

Kalyanaraman asks the introspective question: 'What is the

justification for this comparative etymological dictionary of South

Asian languages currently spoken by over a billion people of the

world?' He says that an answer can be given at a number of levels:

 

1) The paramount need to bring people closer to ancient

heritage of South Asian language family of which the extant South

Asian languages (Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda language streams )

are but dialectical forms.

2) There is an imperative international public need to

generate further studies in the disciplines of a) South Asian

archaeology, b) general semantics and comparative linguistics , c)

design of fifth-generation computer systems

3) There is a need to provide a basis for further studies in

grammatical philosophy and neurosciences on the formation of semantic

patterns or structures in the human brain?? neurosciences related to

the study of linguistic competence which seems to set apart the

humans

from other living beings.

 

Finally Dr Kalyanaraman declares with magisterial clarity:

'The urgent warrant for my etymological dictionary is the difficulty

faced by scholars in collating different lexicons and in obtaining

works such as CDIAL (A Comparative Dictionary of Indo-Aryan

Languages)

even in eminent libraries. In tracing the etyma (literally meaning

truth in Greek) of the South Asian languages, it is adequate to

indicate the word forms which can be traced into the mists of

history'.

 

Dr Kalyanaraman's Dictionary deals with more than 8000

semantic clusters relating to the South Asian Languages. Overarching

this vast region??in geographical, linguistic and cultural

terms??there is an areal 'South Asian Language Type'. Dr.Kalyanaraman

seeks to prove this fact by establishing a semantic concordance among

the so called Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda languages. This area

covers a geographical region bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south

and the mountain ranges which insulate it from other regions of the

Asian Continent on the north, east and west.

 

The semantic clustering attempted by Dr.Kalyanaraman in this

Dictionary rests on the following hypothesis:

 

1 It is possible to reconstruct a proto-South Asian idiom or

lingua franca of circa the centuries traversed by the Indus Valley

Civilization (C.2500 to 1700 BC)

2 South Asia is a linguistic area nursed in the cradle of the

Indus Valley Civilization.

 

Operating within this framework, Dr Kalyanaraman summarily

rejects the two long standing and earlier assertions:

a) Sir William Jones's assertion in 1786 of an Indo-European

Linguistic Family

b) F W Ellis's assertion in 1816 of a southern family of languages.

 

This cleavage was mischievously created by the Colonial

British Rulers as a part of their strategy of Divide and Rule. Dr

Kalyanaraman also dismisses the exclusion of the so-called

Austro-Asiatic or Munda (or Kherwari) languages. His thesis is that

there was a proto-South Asian Linguistic area (C 2500 BC) which

included these three language groups. His underlying assumption is

that the so-called Dravidian, Munda and Aryan Languages can be traced

to an ancient South Asian Family by establishing the unifying

elements

in semantic terms. This is in keeping with the views of G.U.Pope in

another context: ..that between the languages of Southern India and

those of the Aryan family there are many deeply seated and radical

affinities; that the differences between the Dravidian tongues and

the

Aryan are not as great as that between the Celtic for instance and

the

Sanskrit. It is in this spirit that Dr Kalyanaraman has dedicated

this

great dictionary to Panini and Tolkappiyan.

 

Reading this fascinating book, we understand that each

language is only in part an individual instrument. It is in the main,

a community instrument used for community purposes. As such each

language tends to launch out on a career of its own, to which

individuals contribute very much as the coral insect contributes to

the growth of a coral reef or island. The essence of language lies in

the intentional conveyance of ideas from one living being to another

through the instrumentality of arbitrary tokens or symbols agreed

upon

and understood by both as being associated with the particular ideas

in question. In short language in this world is for keeping things

safe in their places. Martin Heidegger rightly says that language is

the house of being.

 

Words are but the signs and counters of knowledge, and their

currency should be strictly regulated by the capital which they

represent. The finest words in the world are only vain sounds, if you

cannot comprehend. Words, when written, crystallize history; their

very structure gives permanence to the unchangeable past. Francis

Bacon said; 'men suppose their reason has command over their words;

still it happens that words in return exercise authority on reason'.

Words may be either servants or masters. If they are servants, they

may safely guide us in the way of truth. If they become our masters,

they intoxicate the brain and lead into swamps of confused thoughts

where there is no solid footing.

 

Language is the amber in which thousands of precious thoughts

have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested thousands of

lightening-flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested,

might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly

passing

and perishing as the lightning. Samuel Taylor Coleridge rightly

observes: 'Language is the armoury of the human mind; and at once

contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future

conquests'.

 

We can infer the spirit of a nation in great measure from the

language, which is a sort of monument to which each forcible

individual in a course of many hundred years of social history has

contributed a stone. And, universally, a good example of this social

force is the veracity of language, which cannot be debauched. In this

context Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly sums up: 'In any controversy

concerning morals, an appeal may be made with safety to the

sentiments

which the language of the people expresses. Proverbs, words and

grammar-inflections convey the public sense with more purity and

precision than the wisest individual'.

 

Language contains so faithful a record of the good and of the

evil which in time past have been working in the minds and hearts of

men, we shall not err, if we regard it as a moral barometer

indicating

and permanently marking the rise or fall of a nation's life. No

wonder

Noah Webster in his Preface to the great AMERICAN DICTIONARY OF THE

ENGLIGH LANGUAGE wrote in 1828: 'Language is the _expression of

ideas;

and if the people of our country cannot preserve an identity of

ideas,

they cannot retain an identity of language'.

 

Viewed in this light language is the most valuable single

possession of the human race. Man does not live on bread alone: his

other indispensable necessity is communication. We shall never

approach a complete understanding of the nature of language, so long

as we confine our attention to its intellectual function as a means

of

communicating thought. Language is a form of human reason, which has

its reasons which are unknown to man. The mastery over reality, both

technical and social, grows side by side with the knowledge of how to

use a language?more particularly words. A word is not a crystal,

transparent and unchanging. In all senses it is the skin of living

thought.

 

I enjoyed reading this Dictionary by Dr Kalyanaraman. I would

pay my tribute to his work in the words of W H Auden: 'Though a work

of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite

and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are

obviously 'truer' than others, some doubtful, some obviously false

and

some absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a

good

dictionary, rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable,

for, in relation to its reader, a dictionary is absolutely passive

and

may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.'

 

http://www.newstodaynet.com/2006sud/06aug/1608ss1.htm

http://newstodaynet.com/2006sud/06aug/1708ss1.htm

 

Lexicon at:

 

http://kalyan97.googlepages.com

http://kalyan96.googlepages.com