RE: [Indic-computing-users] Fwd: article on technical neologisms

[Agastya K. <Aga...@ma...>]

Tapan,

Thanks for the correction on mouse discovery. I did have a comment on your
following statement, which might as well be a summary of your argument:

"In the end, if the more people can understand each other using these
terms, does it really matter how they got there?"

There is a Czech proverb that says, learn a new language, gain a new soul. I
believe this to be true. By learning a new language, one really gains a
completely new perspective. A door opens into a new culture - a gateway
which just can not be crossed by translation. One gets a window in to the
minds and hearts of people who speak the language, and one can communicate
with them such that they can truly express themselves.

If this is true, then it is also true, that by removing a language, you take
away the soul of a culture? Would the Latin American culture really hold its
charm if they Argentines and Brazilians sounded like a New Yorker from
Brooklyn? (no offense intended)

If more people can understand each other using these terms, does it really
matter how they got there? Absolutely. Because the issue is not introduction
of new terms. The issue is reluctance to use and work in the original
language. By not exercising our minds, by not innovating in our language,
we're not just borrowing words - we are eliminating our language. We are
killing our culture's soul. We are giving rise to a generation who will lack
the passion that defines us as a people.

Just my $0.02. I could be wrong.








-----Original Message-----
From: Tapan S. Parikh [mailto:ta...@ya...]
Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 4:53 PM
To: ind...@li...
Cc: Aga...@ma...
Subject: Re: [Indic-computing-users] Fwd: article on technical
neologisms



The story that the mouse was invented at PARC is a common mistake.  The
mouse was in fact invented by Douglas Englebart's group at SRI (formerly
Stanford Research Institute) in the mid 1960s and brought to PARC by
researchers from Englebart's group when they shifted to PARC sometime in
the 70s.  From there Steve Jobs took it for Apple.  

In fact mouse was only meant to be an interim term that somehow "stuck".
 I just saw a video about that the other day.

But it does bring up an interesting point about the intrinsic momentum
of terms and language, and how appropriate and/or useful it is to strive
against that.  Should we really fight against the introduction of
English technical terms into Hindi?  Arent these terms just making their
long way back from (in many cases) the original Sanskrit roots?  

For example, how many of you knew that jungle is actually a Hindi word
adopted into English (and not the other way around)?  Do we really care?
 Just like do we really care that the mouse was invented at SRI (and not
PARC and not Apple)?

In the end, if the more people can understand each other using these
terms, does it really matter how they got there?

I by far think the most troubling thing is the subtraction of language,
not this new kind of addition.  If by forgetting old terms and old
languages we are distancing ourselves from great literary traditions and
our accumulations of human knowledge, than that in my mind is a much
bigger problem than whether or not we come up with a new Hindi word for
mouse, remote control or the GUI.  But are the two trends linked? 
Dunno...

-- Tapan


On Thu, 16 Jan 2003 15:56:36 +0530
Ravikant <rav...@sa...> wrote:

> 
> Dear Indiccers,
> 
> I liked the following article, written by an expat computer engineer,
> for its refreshingly commonsensical approach to technospeak in a new
> language. I received it in my mail. Enjoy!
> 
> ravikant
> -----------------
> How a Language grows
> Agastya Kohli ( Aga...@ma...)
> 
> 
> I am no linguist. I have not studied the growth and development of a
>  language. I am not an expert in the field. But I use languages. I
>  grew up in an environment, where a language wasn't merely a subject
>  you took in school. When you studied a language, you studied it well.
>  So along with learning a couple of languages, I also learned the
>  nature of languages. How they interact with each other, how they
>  interact with the society, how they change over years, grow, develop,
>  flourish, or alternatively, shrink, loose their shine, diminish, and
>  eventually disappear. No, I didn't have a course in college on the
>  topic, but one makes observations, and takes notes.
> 
> 
> For example, I decided to study a little Spanish. Of course, the
> letter "j"
>  is used extensively in Spanish, but is pronounced almost like an "h".
>  'Jesus' is "hay-soos", and Juan is "hu-aan". So when my teacher told
>  me that the Spanish word for "a young man" is "haw-ven", it sounded
>  like another foreign word to me. But then she wrote it on the board -
>  Joven.
> 
> 
> When you grow up in India, speaking Hindi all your life, it doesn't
> take much to make a Yamuna-Jamuna connection, and all of a sudden,
> Joven looked a lot like "yauvan" - Sanskrit for youth. Sure, a young
> man was called "haw-ven". I don't remember much else from that Spanish
> class, but I do remember joven.
> 
> 
> It didn't take a class in linguistics to make the Yamuna-Jamuna
> connection,
>  or to make a Joven-Yauvan connection.  When you study a language, you
>  study the nature of languages simultaneously. Many languages, both
>  Indian and otherwise interchangeably use the sounds "ya" and "ja"
>  (letters I, Y and J),"ra" and "la", "ka" and "ga". I have a German
>  friend named Katja (pronounced Katya), and a Chinese friend who
>  spells the word "are" as "ay - al - ee". No wonder "badariya" is just
>  a derivative of "badaliya" in Hindi, and "bekaar" and "begaar" mean
>  the same thing.
> 
> 
> And in my opinion, that's how languages grow. Whatever is easier to
> say is what becomes the norm. The concept of "mukh-sukh"
> (mouth-comfort) makes a language add words as variants of themselves.
> 
> 
> Its not just with sounds - its also with word meanings. A language has
> a word for a concept. Something similar rolls around, and the same
> word expands its meaning.
> 
> 
> They had these things called coaches - pulled around by horses. People
> could sit in them and go places. A number of years later, the horses
> have now been replaced by internal combustion engines. So what do they
> call a car in Spanish? A "coche". In English, the word "car" really
> comes from "carriage" - which is something that gets carried. So a
> word has a meaning, a related concept attaches itself to it, and the
> word adapts to accommodate the related concept. That's how languages
> grow. Sure some people called them automobiles, but a car is still a
> car in English - one horsepower, or two hundred.
> 
> 
> Of course, my favorite - sticks of wood with cloth soaked in oil tied
> at one end. They would light the cloth on fire, hold the stick on the
> other end, and walk around with it in dark places. It worked as a
> source of light - they called it a "torch". Fast-forward a few hundred
> years, technology changes, now they have plastic tubes with batteries
> on one side and a bulb on the other. It's a source of light - and yes
> you're right - they called it a"torch". Of course, in America, they
> call them "flash lights". A different society saw a product, was
> inspired by a different way of looking at it, and added another word
> to the language.
> 
> 
> They tell me, that a language that doesn't grow - that doesn't change
> with time will eventually die. And I completely agree with them. But I
> am not sure I understand the definition of "grow" and "change with
> time". The way I see it, a language grows by innovation. When a people
> use a language, they come across something new that needs to be
> communicated; a word gets altered, adapted, changed, to communicate
> the new concept. We  - the community that works and plays with Hindi
> seems to work
>  differently. We don't want the language to innovate. We want the
>  language to borrow. A new concept comes along, usually with a word in
>  English, and without thinking twice about how Hindi would express the
>  same concept, we borrow the word. There are examples all over the
>  place.
> 
> 
> When Xerox first developed a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to use on
> a computer, they also developed a pointing device. It was an
> instrument connected to the computer that controlled an arrow like
> cursor on the screen. You moved the device, it moved the arrow, and by
> clicking the buttons you could provide input to the computer. The
> device was an oblong shaped half sphere, about 4 inches long, with a
> cable that ran to the back of the computer. To some creative mind, it
> looked like a small mouse with a long tail, so they called it a mouse.
> In Spanish, they call it a "ratos" (think rat). In Hindi, we can
> easily call it a "moosa" (Sanskrit for mouse). But its so much easier
> to just call it a "mouse" even in Hindi. Do we not have a word for the
> concept? Why do we need to borrow a completely foreign word for
> something that we already have a word for?
> 
> 
> One afternoon, my two-year-old nephew was sitting in front of a
> computer, looking at the cursor - a solid block on the screen -
> blinking. On, off. On, off. He pointed at it, and said "titlee"
> (butterfly). And I thought to myself, if a cursor looks like a
> butterfly to a two year old, that is what we should call it in Hindi.
> Titlee. After all, why is a mouse acceptable, but not a much prettier
> butterfly.
> 
> 
> I've always referred to my TV's remote control as "bandook" (gun).
> Sure, its not exactly the same thing - but its an expansion of a
> concept. If you can"aim-and-shoot" with a camera and a gun, how
> different is a remote control really?
> 
> 
> Lets stick with computers and technology for a little while longer.
> Why is a window (as in Microsoft Windows) not called a "patt" in
> Hindi? Most of the time that's what it is - an information board, a
> "pop up screen". Why do we seem to use "website" as a word in Hindi?
> To me, it's a "parav/padav"(stopping point). Why is an Internet portal
> called a portal? Because it's a launching point from where a surfer
> can go in many different directions. May be we should call it a
> "chauraahaa" in Hindi.
> 
> 
> Lets go outside the world of hi-tech. Hindi newspapers always talk
> about
>  which party has how many "seats" in the parliament. How come we don't
>  use the word "baithak" for it? Since when is "metro" a Hindi word for
>  a local train system in a city? It's not even a word in English!
> 
> 
> Doordarshan and Aakashvani of course have been abandoned as Hindi
> words for television and radio - they have simply become proper nouns
> - names of corporations, leaving us with nothing better than "Teevee"
> as a Hindi word.
> 
> 
> How come we call the burning cloth version of a torch a "mashaal", but
> we
>  call the battery-bulb version a "torch" in Hindi? We have a
>  "gaari/gaadi" - as a moving vehicle. But for some reason, a car is
>  just as much a Hindi word. Was this because Hindi needed to "change
>  with the times"? Or is this something else?
> 
> 
> Yes, a language must grow. If it doesn't, it perishes. But does a
> language grow because people who use it are creative and innovative
> with it? They think it, they speak it, they write it, and they use it?
> Or does it grow because they're too lazy to try to explain things to
> their readers in their own words, and find it much easier to simply
> borrow and replace?
> 
> 
> By simply borrowing words from another language, is Hindi growing? Or
> is it loosing its identity as the soul of over half of the population
> of the country, and becoming a language incapable of being the
> national communication channel of India? If most of the words in Hindi
> are not native, would it still remain and independent language? Would
> people read any literature written in it? Would there be any Nobel
> prizes for Hindi scholars? Or would they simply be ignored and
> described as a "mish-mash language that came about after the British
> invaded India"?
> 
> 
> They might call me a purist, who doesn't want to see the language
> modernize itself. But I'll let them know - I coined the Hindi word for
> a remote control. It doesn't get any more modern than wirelessly
> influencing an electrical appliance. And, I coined the Hindi word for
> a cursor - sure I needed help from a two year old kid to come up with
> that one - but he did better than most professional Hindi journalists
> out there.
> 
> 
> 
> About the Author
> 
> 
> Agastya Kohli, born Jan 31, 1975, and brought up in Delhi, moved to
> Chicago, IL for his Bachelors in Computer Engineering from Illinois
> Institute of Technology, roughly ten years ago. After a stay of four
> years in Chicago, and completion of the degree program, he moved to
> Dallas, TX and worked as a Network and Unix System Administrator for a
> little under 2 years. He then moved again to the greater Seattle, WA
> metro area, and has been working in the wireless telecom industry for
> the last 4 years in various capacities.
> 
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> 
> 
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