Well Said by Us!

I am not going to talk about the current economic trends, why the market went down and all. This blog is all about appreciation. My intention though is not to do a free advertisement, but that could happen. Also No offense meant for any other Nation.

Are you one of those who like to read the morning newspaper (Hindu, Indian Express etc.,) with a nice cup of coffee to begin your day? Or may be the lazy Sunday News paper reader? Or infact a tech savvy person who likes to reduce paper wastage and gets his news from the web? Either ways you might have noticed the language depth and expanse of vocabulary in the articles. I have been reading the online versions of our Indian journals and the American ones like Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Time Magazine etc., I don’t get to read every word or sentence it says but I do read in detail about certain News and some articles as time permits.

Recently I happened to read about the Nexus One release by Google on almost every news site possible. I was trying to gather as much information as possible to consider a possible buy of the cell phone. While doing that I stumbled upon this news on Economic Times. Now, I am not sure if it is the same version that came in the printed copy, but the one on the website was by far the best one about "Nexus One". I felt the author had really given crisp points about the phone and the editor has done a wonderful job pulling it together . In some American counter parts I saw spelling errors, grammar errors and worse - even information errors. Same way I was reading this article today again on Economic Times. Normally this topic will be written more or less like a "Chicken Soup for Office Politics Hater's Soul", but the way this article was written I was simply amazed. If you are interested check it out :).

Reading this, thoughts poured in. We have mastered an international language and are producing works that would stump even the native speakers. Is that because of the fact that our country ranks on top for the most number of official languages (22) and in the 4th position for the most number of languages spoken (427)? Or we did that because we are always surrounded by languages and over years we got it in our nature to master them :). Just a possibility!

The Art of Language

The recent acquaintance with the German language made me ponder about a basic human skill – Languages. While our close relatives, the chimpanzee can only make sounds, use sign language and facial impressions but cannot talk, it is amazing how we, the Homo sapiens one single species can talk in thousands of languages.

In India alone there are 200 registered dialects and 18 official languages. Infact it is the first country to ever do a linguistic study with Astadhyayi written for Sanskrit in 5 BC and Tolkappiyam written for Tamil around 2 BC. The Europeans started it a few centuries later.

I also noticed that the sounds among languages are shared, but not necessarily the meaning. For example in German there is this sound “au” where
                                  - “a” is pronounced as ‘a’ in apostrophe
                                  - “u” is pronounced as ‘u’ in noun

A similar sound is in Hindi and Tamil and a most of other Indian languages.

- In Tamil it is the 12th consonant

- In Hindi it is the 11th consonant

A similar sounding word in different languages would refer to different things. That essentially means in the same human mind at different location/ages/time the same sound reminded of different things. I guess it would be fun to learn linguistics for people who are intrigued by languages. With all that said, if any of you are interested in learning one of the oldest and alive languages Tamil here are a few links, you can even get a degree online :)

 http://pm.tamil.net/pub/pm0100/tolkap.pdf
 http://www.tamilvu.org/coresite/html/cwhomepg.htm