[lit-ideas] Re: Globalization
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2006 22:32:39 +0900
> > Somehow I'm starting to think that getting my kids into language classes in
> > Chinese and Indian might be more pragmatic than Arabic...
Don't want to make a great fuss about this, but there is no "Indian"
to be learned. There is, instead, a choice of
Kannada
Hindi
Gujarati
Marathi
Konkani
Bengali
Oriya
Kashmiri
Assamese
Nissi/Daffia
Ao
Manipuri
Khasi & Garo
Tamil
Malayalam
Punjabi
Telegu
Mizo
*Source: http://www.mapsofindia.com/maps/india/indianlanguages.htm
In a country with so much regional variation, where in several cases
state boundaries have been drawn on linguistic lines, it is but
inevitable that fifteen national languages are recognized by the
Indian constitution. These are spoken in over 1600 dialects.
While India's official language is Hindi in the Devnagri script,
English continues to be the official working language. Most Indians
living in urban and semi-urban towns are multi-lingual. For many in
the metro cities of India, English is virtually their first language,
and for many more, it is the second language. Sanskrit, one of the
oldest languages of the world, is the language in which the great
Indian epics and classical literature have been written.
Source: http://www.indiatravelogue.com/pass/pass7.html
About 80 percent of all Indians--nearly 750 million people based on
1995 population estimates--speak one of the Indo-Aryan group of
languages. Persian and the languages of Afghanistan are close
relatives, belonging, like the Indo-Aryan languages, to the
Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. Brought into India
from the northwest during the second millennium B.C., the Indo-Aryan
tongues spread throughout the north, gradually displacing the earlier
languages of the area.
Modern linguistic knowledge of this process of assimilation comes
through the Sanskrit language employed in the sacred literature known
as the Vedas (see The Vedas and Polytheism, ch. 3). Over a period of
centuries, Indo-Aryan languages came to predominate in the northern
and central portions of South Asia (see Antecedents, ch. 1).
As Indo-Aryan speakers spread across northern and central India, their
languages experienced constant change and development. By about 500
B.C., Prakrits, or "common" forms of speech, were widespread
throughout the north. By about the same time, the "sacred,"
"polished," or "pure" tongue--Sanskrit--used in religious rites had
also developed along independent lines, changing significantly from
the form used in the Vedas. However, its use in ritual settings
encouraged the retention of archaic forms lost in the Prakrits.
Concerns for the purity and correctness of Sanskrit gave rise to an
elaborate science of grammar and phonetics and an alphabetical system
seen by some scholars as superior to the Roman system. By the fourth
century B.C., these trends had culminated in the work of Panini, whose
Sanskrit grammar, the Ashtadhyayi (Eight Chapters), set the basic form
of Sanskrit for subsequent generations. Panini's work is often
compared to Euclid's as an intellectual feat of systematization.
The Prakrits continued to evolve through everyday use. One of these
dialects was Pali, which was spoken in the western portion of
peninsular India. Pali became the language of Theravada Buddhism;
eventually it came to be identified exclusively with religious
contexts. By around A.D. 500, the Prakrits had changed further into
Apabhramshas, or the "decayed" speech; it is from these dialects that
the contemporary Indo-Aryan languages of South Asia developed. The
rudiments of modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars were in place by about A.D.
1000 to 1300.
It would be misleading, however, to call Sanskrit a dead language
because for many centuries huge numbers of works in all genres and on
all subjects continued to be written in Sanskrit. Original works are
still written in it, although in much smaller numbers than formerly.
Many students still learn Sanskrit as a second or third language,
classical music concerts regularly feature Sanskrit vocal
compositions, and there are even television programs conducted
entirely in Sanskrit.
Around 18 percent of the Indian populace (about 169 million people in
1995) speak Dravidian languages. Most Dravidian speakers reside in
South India, where Indo-Aryan influence was less extensive than in the
north. Only a few isolated groups of Dravidian speakers, such as the
Gonds in Madhya Pradesh and Orissa, and the Kurukhs in Madhya Pradesh
and Bihar, remain in the north as representatives of the Dravidian
speakers who presumably once dominated much more of South Asia. (The
only other significant population of Dravidian speakers are the
Brahuis in Pakistan.)
The oldest documented Dravidian language is Tamil, with a substantial
body of literature, particularly the Cankam poetry, going back to the
first century A.D. Kannada and Telugu developed extensive bodies of
literature after the sixth century, while Malayalam split from Tamil
as a literary language by the twelfth century. In spite of the
profound influence of the Sanskrit language and Sanskritic culture on
the Dravidian languages, a strong consciousness of the distinctness of
Dravidian languages from Sanskrit remained. All four major Dravidian
languages had consciously differentiated styles varying in the amount
of Sanskrit they contained. In the twentieth century, as part of an
anti-Brahman movement in Tamil Nadu, a strong movement arose to
"purify" Tamil of its Sanskrit elements, with mixed success. The other
three Dravidian languages were not much affected by this trend.
There are smaller groups, mostly tribal peoples, who speak
Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic languages. Sino-Tibetan speakers live
along the Himalayan fringe from Jammu and Kashmir to eastern Assam
(see fig. 9). They comprise about 1.3 percent, or 12 million, of
India's 1995 population. The Austroasiatic languages, composed of the
Munda tongues and others thought to be related to them, are spoken by
groups of tribal peoples from West Bengal through Bihar and Orissa and
into Madhya Pradesh. These groups make up approximately 0.7 percent
(about 6.5 million people) of the population.
Despite the extensive linguistic diversity in India, many scholars
treat South Asia as a single linguistic area because the various
language families share a number of features not found together
outside South Asia. Languages entering South Asia were "Indianized."
Scholars cite the presence of retroflex consonants, characteristic
structures in verb formations, and a significant amount of vocabulary
in Sanskrit with Dravidian or Austroasiatic origin as indications of
mutual borrowing, influences, and counterinfluences. Retroflex
consonants, for example, which are formed with the tongue curled back
to the hard palate, appear to have been incorporated into Sanskrit and
other Indo-Aryan languages through the medium of borrowed Dravidian
words.
Source: http://countrystudies.us/india/64.htm
"Chinese" is more plausible, since the Beijing dialect of Mandarin,
the Chinese language spoken in various dialects in the northern and
western two-thirds of the country has been designated as "Guoyu," the
"national language" and made the basis of all state-sponsored formal
education. In the southern part of the country, roughly everything
south of the Yangtse, there are distinct languages divided by
linguists into Wu, Northern and Southern Min, Tiochew, Cantonese,
Hakka....I'm sure I have missed some. Cantonese and Hokkien (the
variety of Southern Min I learned to speak in Taiwan) bear the same
sort of relation to Mandarin as Romanian to French or Spanish.
Just thought you ought to know.
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku
Yokohama 220-0006, JAPAN
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