Can Parent and Daughter co-exist?

[Vidhyanath Rao]

<JoatSimeon at aol.com> wrote:

>> vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu writes:

>> Is formal Tamil a living language? And, if you try to regard formal and
>> colloquial Tamil as different registers, how do you tell different
>> registers of a langauge from two distinct languages?

> -- if you read a piece of formal Tamil out loud, can a
> colloquial-Tamil-speaker who hasn't received any training in formal Tamil
> understand it?

There are three problems with this. First is the implicit assumption that
command of a language is determined by understanding it, rather than being
able to produce new `correct' sentences in it.

Secondly, I don't know what  `training in formal Tamil' means. Some
decades ago, movie dialogues contained good doses of formal Tamil.
Nowadays, non-entertainment programs on TV and public speeches are usually
in formal Tamil. Within the last generation, the percentage of children
who never went to school has decreased dramatically. Given that exposure
to a language in early childhood leads rather quickly to passive mastery,
the suggested experiment is not really possible. [One thing we can try is
to use children of expatriates who have not been taught their `mother
tongue'. But then I expect the result to be negative, based on what have
heard about.]

Finally, there is the assumption that 3rd-4th c. Prakrit speakers who were
around those who could speak Sanskrit but were never taught it could not
understand Sanskrit. Available evidence does not support this. Servants
growing up in royal or Brahmin households are often portrayed in dramas
and stories as being able to understand Sanskrit (but, barring exceptional
cases, not as capable of speaking it: the sounds unique to Sanskrit were
thought to be beyond such people, women etc.). Modern equivalents also
support this: When `standard tricks' such as compounds with words used
postpositionally instead of nominal inflection (such as mu:lam or dva:ra:
for the instrumental) or nouns combined with a small class of high
frequency verbs instead of finite verbs are used, Indians, who often know
a surprising amount of Sanskrit nouns, even if they don't know the
`correct pronunciation', are surprised to find that they can understand a
good percentage of simple sentences.

Actually, it seems that even the pronunciation difference might be
overblown. It is commonly assumed that the pronunciation of Sanskrit
always followed/s the values given in the primers. This is and was not the
case. Handbooks attached to Vedic schools give minute rules positing
different values suggestive of Prakritic pronunciation. For example, a
common mantra used after pujas often goes ` ... namo bajam ...'. I will
leave it to you to figure out what `bajam' stands for. Johnston, in his
notes to Buddhacarita, cites examples of transcriptions into Chinese and
metrical anomalies that suggest a Prakritic pronunciation. We cannot
ignore the effects of these on understandability either. (The same applied
to Latin, as Steven Gustafson pointed out.)