Hello,
After a gap
of almost 2 months, I am back. My reasons for absence remain same as ever: school
work, a little bit of extracurricular activities and other such things. But
that’s all irrelevant now that I am back.
Today, I am
going to talk about names- more specifically Hindu names. The reason that I am
going to limit this post to Hindu names is because Hindu names derive either
from Sanskrit, or one of Sanskrit-derived languages (called Indo-Aryan
languages), and I am most familiar with these languages.
Let me tell
you about a few incidents related to my name.
When I tried speaking one of my first Sanskrit sentences- ‘My name is
Yash’- I was told that my name is not Yash, but Yashah. When asked the reason
this ‘ah’ was added, I was not given a very satisfactory answer. That was that. Next, when I moved to Kolkata (in West
Bengal), I found out that my name in Bengali would be Josh. I had learnt that proper nouns remained the
same across languages. For example, when I am speaking English, I do not
introduce myself as Fame (which is what Yash means).
So let me
first examine the reason for these changes in Bengali and Sanskrit. In Bengali,
my name becomes Josh, because Bengali lacks the vowel a, and the consonant y cannot
occur here . But why does it convert ‘a’ to ‘o’ and ‘y’ to ‘j’? Why doesn’t ‘a’
become ‘aa’ (which Bengali has)? The reason gets me to Sanskrit. The original
Sanskrit word was ‘Yashah’. The ‘ah’ was actually added to a lot of masculine
nouns. All of Sanskrit daughter languages either lost this ‘ah’ or converted it
to something else. After this, several sound changes occurred. Bengali was one
language which underwent great amounts of sound changes. Among them was a-->o, and y-->j. Therefore the Sanskrit-derived
word in Bengali is Josh. So the reason that my name changes in these languages
is because the original parent word for my name (Yashah) has many children, and
all of these children are perfectly acceptable substitutes. Simple enough?
Not really.
There are two problems with this theory. The first problem is that ‘Yash’ is
not really a Hindi word. By normal development of sounds, Sanskrit ‘Yash-ah’
would become Hindi ‘Jas’ (which is incidentally what my grandfather calls me).
However, Hindi has undergone a huge number of Sanskritization attempts, and the
bastard child of Sanskrit ‘Yashah’ and Hindi ‘Jas’ is what I am stuck with:
Yash. So what language does the name Yash even come from?
Secondly, a
lot of Sanskrit names have cognates (words which derive from the same source)
as Latin, French, Italian, German, Irish, Russian, English to name a few
languages. For examples consider the Hindi name ‘Suraj’ which derives from
Sanskrit ‘Suryah’. ‘Suryah’ derives from a word in an old language (called
Proto-Indo-European), from which derive Latin ‘Sol’ , Greek ‘Helios’ and
English ‘Sun’. So if ‘Josh’ an acceptable substitute for ‘Yash’, shouldn’t
‘Sun’ be an acceptable substitute for ‘Suraj’? Doesn’t usually happen, does it?
So why this
disparity? I think the reason is two-fold. Firstly, since Bengali, Hindi and
other Indian languages have over centuries remained in contact with each other,
memory of their common origins haven’t been lost and correspondences between
them can be easily established. On the other hand, very few people are aware of
the connection between Latin/Greek and Sanskrit for example, and even I they
are, no one except linguistics can derive the sound correspondences between
them.
Secondly,
Bengali, Hindi and other languages are written with scripts derived from the
same parent script (Brahmi). Most often, it’s not spellings of words which have
changes but the way the letters are pronounced has. So the Bengali equivalent
of the Hindi letter ‘ya’ is pronounced ‘ja’. So to make a Hindi name Bengali,
all that needs to be done is to replace each Hindi letter with its Bengali
equivalent and then ask a Bengali native to read it out for you.
Like my post about dialects and languages, I don’t arrive at a
conclusive answer here. Instead, I have just presented some strange and/or
interesting phenomena relating to names across languages and given plausible
explanations for them. I admit I have highlighted more problems than I have offered solutions.
Yash
