Just a small note

I haven't ever written a post without any linguistics related matter until today, and I don't want to either but I wanted to tell all my readers (who are not in large numbers) that I am terribly sorry for the long intervals between multiple posts and this will continue until the 1st of June, when I have my SATs. But since I like sprinkling the bad news with the good news, I want to add that you should expect a lot of posts in the week after my SAT because that is the time I will be in Mumbai attending the Orientation-cum-Selection Camp for the International Linguistics Olympiad. So this blog and I are both looking forward to an interesting post-SAT week. 

Yash

You think what you speak

Hi, it's been a long time since I posted. What with final exams, and school fest, and ten million essays to write and the laziness following all of this, I think I can be excused. Anyway, the important thing is here I am with a new post. Have a look.

I recently came across an article, which I found rather interesting and worth sharing with you all. You can find the link to the original article at the bottom of the page. The article talks about how speakers of different languages think differently. Yes, you read it right. If I speak Greek, I think Greek. If I speak Japanese, I think Japanese. 

To understand this, we have to firstly appreciate that languages are different. While this may seem obvious, the point I am trying to highlight is that suppose you switch from Turkish to Tamil, you wouldn't simply be substituting every word for another. Rather, you will have to change all your ideas about nouns and verbs, and all the other words, about how their forms vary, and about how all these words in their different forms must combine with each other to form a complete sentence. Thus, it is clear that when we switch from one language to another, we switch our way of thinking about sounds, words and sentences. So far, so good.

But what if I were to tell you that speakers of different languages not only think differently about processes associated with languages, but also with respect to various objects? What if Spanish speakers think of bridges differently from what German speakers think of bridges? That indeed seems to be the case. 

In a study described in the aforementioned link, German speakers described bridges as 'elegant', 'pretty' and 'beautiful', whereas Spanish speakers described them as 'strong' and 'sturdy'. If you notice carefully, German speakers tended to stick with words generally reserved for all things feminine, while Spanish speakers with 'masculine' words. Now, if you know a thing or two about these languages, you probably know that both of them put nouns into genders. And guess what? Bridges are masculine in Spanish and feminine in German. Thus, these imaginary genders of words, which is often an unnecessary inconvenience to learners of these language, affect how speakers of these languages think of these words. Also, I might add that in the same experiment, a key, which was masculine in German and feminine in Spanish was described by 'masculine' adjective by German speakers and 'feminine' adjectives by Spanish speakers. 

So much for genders. But languages don't just make us think of objects in different ways. In fact, different languages give us a different idea of space and direction. Let us consider the Kuuk Thaayorre people in northern Australia. They are a group of Aborginal people who always, always use cardinal direction terms (like north, south etc.) instead of direction words which are used in reference to a certain person/object (like right, left etc.) This means, that these people, unlike English speakers always remain oriented. They always know which direction is north, and which is south, which may not be true for English speakers. Thus, the language they speak forces them to think of direction in a particular way.

This difference is not limited to languages which use cardinal direction instead of reference directions, but also to languages whose writing scripts run from right to left, or from top to bottom. For example, an experiment was carried out where participants were asked to arrange pictures of a man ageing in temporal order. They weren't asked to do so in a particular direction. It was found that English speakers arranged the pictures from left to right, while Hebrew speakers did so from right to left. It cannot be a mere coincidence that English is written from left to right, and Hebrew from right to left. Also, just in case you might be interested, the Kuuk Thaayorre participants arranged it from east to west, no matter which direction they were facing. 

This idea of direction also extends to time. For example, when English speakers talk about time using space metaphors, they always use horizontal ones. In English, bad times lie ahead of us; those days are behind us. But for Mandarin speakers, the next month is down month, and the previous month is the up month i.e.  a vertical metaphor is being used to describe time. And I know you've guessed/known it before, but I should add that Mandarin is written vertically from top to bottom. 

It's scary how much the language we speak affects how we think. It shapes the world around us, gives imaginary genders to objects, gives us a sense of direction. After knowing all this, I feel that in some ways, languages can limit our abilities to think about the world. Monolingual speakers see the world in one perspective. Maybe there are more advantages to being multilingual than we think, especially when the languages we speak are not closely related. Obviously, if you speak what you think, the more ways you speak, the more ways you think. 

And here is the link to the original article: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html

Yash

The Tongue of the Gods

Today, I am going to be speaking about the relation that language and religion share with each other. Religion  has been a defining aspect of most cultures of the world. I have highlighted, time and time again, how language impacts and is impacted by culture. Hence, it is only logical that religion impacts language, and language impacts religion.

One thing that religion does to languages is that it may uplift the status of a certain language. Every religion has a language which it considers its 'holy language'. Usually, this language is the mother tongue of the original followers of the religion.Gradually, as the religion spreads to new people, the language, even though not the mother tongue of its new followers, becomes one of high status and prestige among them.

Consider for example, Islam and Hinduism. Hinduism's prestige language was/is Sanskrit. The Rig Veda was composed in Sanskrit, the Indo-Aryans, the original followers of Hinduism spoke Sanskrit. When the Aryans settled in the Indian subcontinent, they met with a lot of other people including the Dravidians, who spoke the languages from which the modern South Indian languages are derived. Sanskrit spread through the subcontinent, along with Hinduism. The result is that today, even millennia after it ceased to be spoken, Sanskrit is considered by many in India, including in South India to be the most prestigious and most refined language.

Similarly, the first Muslims spoke Arabic. As Islam spread in North Africa, Persia and then into India, so did Arabic. Arabic is the language Muslims recite the Koran/Quran in. Infact, in North Africa, Arabic has even become the lingua franca. Towards the east of Arabia , Persian still remains the lingua franca in Iran, but Arabic still retains its status as the language of Islam.

It is not always necessary that the holy language is the language of the first followers of the religion. For example, the first Christians spoke Hebrew. But the holy language of the largest denomination of Christianity, Roman Catholicism is not Hebrew, but Latin. The Roman is our clue. The religion made its way to Rome, and Rome propagated its brand of Christianity along with its language of that time, Latin. Thus, Latin became the prestige language for most of Western Europe. Even English, which does not have roots in Latin is full of words with Latin etymologies.

If a culture accepts another language as its prestige language, it does not automatically imply that it abandons its own language. Persian and Tamil are two languages which come to my mind, which despite not being the holy languages of the religions their speakers follow, which have a very rich literature.

It is not always true that people modify their languages to suit their religion. Sometimes, religions need to cater to the people and change their languages to suit their followers. The most prominent example of this, that I am aware of is Buddhism and Jainism. Obviously, they are separate religions now, but originally, they rose as sects of Hinduism, with the primary purpose of countering the Brahman domination of mainstream Hinduism. They opposed the Vedas, preached atheism/agnosticism, among other things. What is of importance to us, however, is that they opposed the preaching of religious sermons in Sanskrit, a language, which by that time, common people did not understand. They began preaching in the Prakrits, the common languages of the people. Thus, Buddhism and Jainism are examples of how religions adapt according to languages.

Even in the previous example I used, Christianity, first adapted itself to Rome, by switching to Latin, and then those who converted to Christianity after Rome, adapted themselves to accept Latin as the tongue of their God.

On, that note, I will conclude this post by saying that I believe languages and religion have a two-way relation, where one impacts the other and vice versa. The people revere the tongue of their gods and the gods learn to speak in the tongue of the people. Obviously, the two don't happen simultaneously, but one after the other. 

And now, I have a question for you: do you hold the language associated with religion in your culture in higher regard than your daily speech? For what reasons? Let me know in you comments. 

Yash

Is it a dialect, is it a language?

There was a time when I heard someone I knew describing all Indian languages to someone of non-Indian origin as 'dialects of Hindi'. Ironically, this person was not even a Hindi speaker. Anyway, I thought his remark was rather ignorant, considering that I've been taught there are multiple languages spoken in India, and that there is no standard Indian language, of which other languages are mere dialects.

But lately, I have been questioning that assumption. That is not to imply that I am saying one language is India's standard language and the others are not worthy of being called languages. But rather, can languages/ dialects so close to each other really be separated out?

The actual question here is how we define dialect, as separate from language. A Yiddish scholar, Max Weinreich popularised a saying which goes along the lines of: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. I think what Weinreich wanted to say was that whether something is a language or a dialect is not determined by the language/dialect itself but rather by political conditions. If a dialect has an 'army or navy', i.e. if its speakers have the political power to present it as a language, rather than a dialect, then a language it is. The whole process seems kind of arbitrary.

Consider for example, the various dialects of Hindi. The whole idea of placing a bunch of dialects under the label of Hindi is rather weird. This is especially if you consider that Standard Hindi and Punjabi, which are separate languages resemble each other more than Standard Hindi and eastern dialects of Hindi do. At one point of time, a language called Maithili was classified as a dialect of Hindi, even though linguistically it was much closer to Bengali than to Standard Hindi. Eventually, Maithili was recognized as a separate language, and not as a dialect of Hindi and was added to the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution.

The whole process seems random at times. If someone demands a language status for their mother tongue, and the conditions are favourable, then perhaps the mother tongue can be classified as a language. Let us try to make a little sense out of this mess.

One important factor which determines the difference between a language and a dialect is politics. The politics of identity, of nationalities, and other such things. For example, consider Serbian and Croatian. Both are almost the same language, or dialects of the same language at the most. Yet, because of the fact that different cultures associate themselves with that/those language(s), and that they want to highlight their difference from each other, Serbian and Croatian are two separate languages. Just a little disclaimer: I am not very informed about Slavic culture or politics, so I sincerely apologize if I have made any ignorant or uninformed comments.

To me, the above example doesn't seem very strange because I have seen something similar close to home: India speaks Hindi, Pakistan speaks Urdu. (India also speaks Urdu in places such as Hyderabad and Kashmir) Aside from their scripts, which is a matter of convention, they are virtually the same language. If they differ, it's in their educated vocabulary- maybe, Hindi and Urdu are dialects of the greater Hindi-Urdu language, or maybe they are the exact same thing. We don't know-but what we do know is that same language has been divided into two by political divisions.

But sometimes, politics works the other way to unite multiple mother tongues into a single language. In China, there is a multitude of languages spoken (the Mandarin dialect being only one of them), but all of them are classified as Chinese dialects, even though there are various dialects which are mutually unintelligible i.e. speakers of one tongue don't understand the other. Yet, everything is counted as Chinese. Why? Because the idea that the whole nation shares a single language promotes the idea of national solidarity.

Politics however is not the only factor in classification. One other factor is the amount of literature the language has. In a previously mentioned example regarding Hindi, the belt of dialects extends to, but does not include Bengali. Why is Bengali not a dialect of Hindi, but languages in its neighbourhood, which resemble it more closely than they resemble Standard Hindi, are? There could be multiple reasons, but one factor is the wealth of literature that Bengali possesses. Its literature calls for its classification as a separate language.

But if literature is a deciding factor, what about the dialects of Hindi- Awadhi or Braj? Much of the initial literature in Hindi was written in these dialects. But, as time passed on, the importance shifted from Braj and Awadhi to Khari Boli, which forms today's Standard dialect. So, why did Awadhi and Braj, despite their vast literature cease to be languages in their own right? I believe the answer lies in the history of these languages. An accurate answer would involve a historical analysis, but the point I was trying to make is that literature is not a make-or-break point in a dialect's quest to become language.

At the end of it, I am still not convinced that the classification of mother tongues as languages or dialects is not arbitrary. So there isn't much hope that I have managed to convince you of the same either. But what I think I have managed to do is to add a little bit of sense to this arbitrary process. There isn't an exact answer, there are a lot of answers, and all I have done is given you some of them. So tell me, what do you think determines if a mother tongue is a language or dialect?

Yash

Why languages change over time? Because of YOU!

In my previous posts, you might have noticed that there was a lot of mention of words and sounds of a language changing over time. In this post, my goal is to make you believe, that in this very day, probably at this very moment, you are responsible for changing languages. When you change the words and sounds of a language enough, you create a new language.

For example, take a look back to the previous paragraph. Read it aloud. Are you sure you've read it? Now tell me how did you pronounce 'probably'? If you are like most of the English speakers I've come across, you said prob'ly, omitting one 'b'. Even if you did pronounce both the b's, which is quite possible, you must definitely have heard people say the word with only one 'b'. (Even if I did not convince you with this example, there are more of them to come, so don't quit reading yet.)

So you say, "Okay, fine, some people pronounce probably with one less b. Big deal!." YES, big deal. And I'll tell you why. Think of it like this. There is a pronunciation rule which says that when two labial stops (or simply put: b, p- don't let the word labial frighten you) occur one after the other, the second one is omitted. This change does not happen in all places,only in certain places, determined by more complex rules. But why is it a big deal? Because if this sound changes persists for long enough, it will be responsible for making new words out of existing English ones, thus changing English to another language, which after some time will not be comprehensible for English speakers. Don't believe me? I'll give you proof. This change has already been documented in a language change. From Sanskrit to Hindi. Here goes:

'Pipaasha' is the Sanskrit word for thirst. 'Pipaasha' leads to 'Pipaasa'; 'sh' changing to 's' is not a very uncommon change: a lot of Hindi speakers pronounce 'sh' as 's'. So we get 'Pipaasa'. And now comes our master rule. The one we derived from probably-prob'ly. Elimination of labial stop (p,b) when there are two of those occurring next to each other. Thus, 'Pipaasa' becomes 'Piasa', which ultimately was standardized as 'Pyaas'. Voila! 'Pyaas' is Hindi for thirst. There you go. First evidence that a change you make while speaking can be responsible for a new language coming up.

As I promised, there'll be more evidence. So I am going to show a second example. This example is also about sound changes. But before we go to that let me tell you that there is a group of consonants called the palatals ('ch', and 'j' for example) and coronals ('t' and 'd' for example). Now tell me, have you heard people say, 'Whachoo doing?' when they mean to say, 'What you doing?' (Grammatically: What are you doing?). Here the 't' of 'what' is linked to the 'y' of 'you to give 'ch'. If we generalize this, we can say: coronal + y = palatal.

Once again, we will be applying this sound change in English, which you are responsible for, to the transition of Sanskrit to Hindi. Truth 'Satya' has t + y, which is a coronal + y, which would give us 'ch' in its place. We'll get 'Sacha'- the Hindi for truth.

Obviously, one or two changes do not create new languages. From the birth of human language, thousands of such changes must have occurred which made different languages so diverse. But my purpose was to show you the process on a small scale, and let you imagine it on a larger scale. Thus, at this very moment, we are making changes which have defined new languages in the past, and are very capable of creating new ones in the future.

So, now that we have agreed that you and I are capable of changing languages, think of this process on a larger scale. Through all the millennia of human existence, of the billions and billions of people that have ever lived, each one of them has contributed bit by bit to the process of language change. The result is that there was one time where our ancestors began communicating using simple sounds, and now we have at least 6000 different human languages in existence. I think you can take a little credit for that.

Yash

"Words and sounds carry histories with them. Not only their own histories, but those of people who have uttered those words."- Me aka Yash.

My blog description starts with this quote by me. I think the quote deserves a post of its own . What do I mean when I say that 'words' and 'sounds' carry histories with them? Why do I believe so? This post answers all of these questions and more.  Also, in this post, I will try to be more global, in contrast to my previous post, where I was talking about an Indian language. 

So firstly, what do I mean by the quote. I mean and I believe that our languages are more than just tools of communicating. They carry all information about what the speakers of the language as a whole, have seen in their multiple years of existence, what other peoples and languages have they come across, and much more. As such, languages record a part of the people's history. There have been times where languages have helped us answer some questions from History. 

So now, why do I believe so? Take for instance,  the 'have seen in their multiple years of existence' part. Languages have vocabularies. Vocabulary is the body of words used in a language. When people encounter something new, which they are likely to come across again and again, they assign a word to it. By doing so, they are creating a record of the existence of that object. 

Living in the twenty-first century, we are no strangers to the concept of adding new words to languages. The technological revolution has added so many words to our jargon: email, texting, captcha, blog, to name a few. I would not be surprised if say 800 years from now,  new technology not withstanding, the presence of these words in a text will be used to date documents, as those before the Internet revolution, or those after. By inventing these words, we have added meaning to sounds and symbols, which have stored an imprint of our civilization. 

If the above example seems too hypothetical for you, let us take a real example. There is a group of languages known as the Indo-European (IE) languages. These languages are all derived from a totally undocumented, unspoken, but a common ancestor, called the Proto-Indo-European (PIE). We have traced the existence of this language by comparing various Indian, Iranian and European languages  The speakers of these languages are called the PIE people and they migrated to all over south Asia and Europe, and ended up spreading their language, which evolved into various daughter languages. The result: a very large percentage of the world's population speaks IE languages. Now there are various questions regarding these people. What was their original homeland? When did they begin spreading? There are various theories regarding this, and my purpose is not to answer these questions. But, words can provide a clue about the answers.

Most of earlier IE languages (Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Persian) have similar words for 'horse'. If you know these words, it might seem they are not so similar after all, but there is a series of sound changes which accounts for their little differences. But in any case, assume, for the sake of my argument, that these words all derive from the same PIE word. That means, PIE could not have split into various languages before its speakers had come across the horse, and added a word for it to their vocabulary. What does that tell us? That PIE speakers, before diverging into various groups lived/had lived in a place where there were horses. Similarly, PIE also had a word for 'chariot', which would imply that PIE speakers invented the chariot before spreading. This is what would constitute linguistic evidence. Linguistic evidence, along with archaeological and genetic evidence can help us answer questions about these people.

Another way in which words help us know about the history of their people is through the similarities between words across languages. The similarity of words in IE languages helped us find out about the existence of their common ancestor, the PIE. Similarly, the similarity of the Romani language, a language spoken by Romani people of Europe, with North Indian languages, helped us trace the  origins of the Romani people to North India. Genetic evidence supported this hypothesis. 

Words and sounds also record history, when those of one language create an impact on another one. For example, see my previous post about how the Hindi word for 'I' has come from Persian. This word, with what I assume would probably be millions of other word, is evidence that Persia and India definitely had very strong cultural links. 

Even though I had promised, I would make this post more 'global', there is another very interesting phenomena in Hindi, which I feel obliged to show. Originally, Hindi lacked the sound 'f''. When words from Persian and Arabic entered Hindi, 'f' was pronounced as 'ph' (p with a puff of air, how British and American English speakers pronounce p in the beginning of words) . So 'safed' (white) became 'saphed', '' 'faisla' (decision) became 'phaisla'. A very large percentage of the population pronounces these words so.

But at the same time, there began a process of correction- an attempt to replicate the original sounds: so 'safed' was pronounced 'safed' and 'faisla' was pronounced 'faisla'. However, along with it, the 'correction' spread to the original Hindi 'ph' as well, which became 'f'. So the original 'phal' (fruit) is now pronounced 'fal', and 'phool (flower) is now 'fool' (pronounced the same as the English fool). Now, there exists two groups of speakers: those who use 'ph' in all cases (which is generally thought of as the 'uneducated' way to pronounce the letter), and those who use 'f' in all cases. Very few speakers retain the distinction between the Persian 'f' and the Indian 'ph'. Persian and Arabic, have very lastingly made their imprint on Hindi, and this process has recorded the historic influence that Persia had on India.

And therefore, my quote.

Hoping that this was an interesting read, signing off from my second post,

Yash

What do 'I' call myself?

UPDATE: 26th October, 2013
Everyone,
I have been researching a little more and I have found out that my hypothesis about the origins of "main" might not be exactly correct. If I find out the exact origins, I will let you know. But I am pretty sure about the origins of "hum".


ORIGINAL POST:

I have a friend, with whom I frequently have arguments about whether my Hindi is 'correct' or hers (Both she and I are native Hindi speakers, but as with a lot of school students in India, I use a fair amount of English with most of my friends). I put 'correct' in inverted commas because despite what your grammar teachers might tell you, I believe that language is in a constant stage of evolution and correctness is defined by the will of the majority of the speakers. Our arguments are more for the sake of fun.

Without drifting off to another topic, which will occupy its own blog post in the future, I'll come back to the original problem: what do 'I' call myself. The problem is that in standard written Hindi, the word for I (which I deem 'correct') is 'मैं' ( pronounced mɛː/mæ: *with a tilde over æ/ɛ, which I am unable to type*]). However, a lot of speakers (which includes this friend) use हम (həm) for I, which in standard Hindi would actually mean the plural i.e. 'we'. That was the observation. But my self-assigned task was not to simply observe, but to account. My question was 'Why the 'मैं'/'हम' argument ?'

However, the answer to the question did not come from Hindi, but instead from Persian and Sanskrit. For readers not familiar with the relation Hindi has with these two languages: Sanskrit is the mother of Hindi, along with that of various other North Indian languages; Persian has provided Hindi (and Urdu) with a lot of vocabulary during Islamic rule in India.

While I was learning (read: trying to learn) Persian, I came across the Persian word for I: من (mæ*with tilde*), which is pronounced almost the same as the Hindi 'मैं'. Considering the fact that a lot of Hindi vocabulary was derived from Persian, it was not unlikely that this was borrowed as well. Especially when we consider the Sanskrit word for I, 'अहम् ' (əhəm), which looks nothing like 'मैं'. On the other hand, हम (həm) and 'अहम् ' (əhəm) only differ in that the Hindi form has lost the initial ə. Could it be that Persian gives me my favourite 'मैं' and Sanskrit gives my friend her favourite 'हम'?

To answer that, we need to look at more than Standard Hindi, and a little bit at Indian geography. For people not familiar with Indian geography, an Indian map would come in handy at this point of time. Most of North India speaks languages derived from Sanskrit. I will specifically be looking at the belt stretching from Punjab to Bihar, because I am most familiar with languages from there. Punjabi uses ਮੈਂ ( mɛː*with tilde*). Bhojpuri, which is spoken in Bihar, and is often classified as an eastern dialect of Hindi uses 'हम'. Punjab is at the north-western border of India. Bihar lies on the east. Speakers of Hindi raised in Delhi are more likely to use 'मैं', while those is Lucknow are likely to use 'हम'. Lucknow and Delhi are closer to each other than Punjab and Bihar are, but Lucknow lies in the region which is associated with the Awadhi dialect of Hindi, which was the standard Hindi dialect for quite sometime before it was replaced by the Delhi Hindi dialect Khariboli. This explains why now the standard Hindi I is मैं.

So far so good. But we still haven't answered our question. Why do people in Delhi and Punjab use मैं, while those in Lucknow and Bihar use हम? I think it has got to do with the fact that Delhi and Punjab are towards the west of India, more closer to Persian speaking regions, and places where Islamic and Persian culture reached before it reached Bihar and Lucknow. Thus the western languages adopted the new 'I', the eastern ones stuck to the Sanskrit-derived 'I'. There seems to be a line running somewhere through the middle of Uttar Pradesh, which divides the languages spoken in this belt into two. The western ones share some features, the eastern ones share some features. The मैं/हम distinction is only one such feature. I might discuss other such features in future posts.

Now, to my original two characters of the story. My friend and I. My friend was raised in Kolkata, in West Bengal. Even though Bengal lies outside the Hindi speaking zone, there is a significant Hindi speaking population here. The Hindi in Kolkata is influenced by the one in the neighbouring state of Bihar, which we have identified as a 'हम' state. Hence, she uses हम. I, on the other hand, have been raised in various places, two of which, Jamshedpur and Kolkata, are very much 'हम'cities. Yet, my mother was raised in western Uttar Pradesh which is very clearly a 'मैं' region. Moreover, since I have been raised in different cities, I tended to pick up the language taught in schools rather than the one acquired locally. Hence I am a 'मैं' person.

So that's me signing off after my first post, which I am particularly pleased with, and which I will definitely ask my 'हम' friend to read, who will definitely ignore my request. Hopefully, I was at least able to captivate your interest for you to read my future posts.

Yash