[lg policy] http://www.blogcatalog.com/search/frame?term=language+policy&id=0a769e34ca679a9ee839e24b55d79c19

Sat Apr 3 16:12:20 UTC 2010

OUR LANGUAGE POLICY HYPOCRISY

OUR LANGUAGE POLICY HYPOCRISY

It is said that Japanese Premier Tojo while replying to US Presidency
Harry S Trueman’s ultimatum of July 26, 1945 said that Japan would
"Mmakusatsu" which in Japanese meant that his Government would
'consider it.' But the translators quoted him in English as saying
that the Japanese would 'take no notice of it'. So atom bombs
destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There could be several
such undocumented and unnoticed bungles in international diplomacy.
There are innumerable cases of individual injustice due to
multilingualism or ambiguity and misinterpretation even in the same
language. For example before the Russian Revolution an Assyriologist
Netomelf was exiled to Siberia for life on a charge of blasphemy
because he was not given a chance to explain that his book about

Nebuchadnezzar did not mean “Ne boch and Netzar (Russian for ‘No God
and No Tzar’) Once in UN, a translator translated "Out of sight-out of
mind" into an expression the Russians understood as ‘invisible
insanity’. During Napolean III ‘s coup d’etat one of his officers
Count de Saint-Arnaud on being informed that a mob was approaching the
Imperial Guard, coughed and exclaimed with his hand across his throat
“Ma sacree toux!” (my damned cough). But his lieutenant understanding
him to say “Massacrez tous” (Massacre them all ) gave the order to
fire , killing thousands.

Every language suffers from syntactical and phonetical ambiguities in
addition to these if there are situations wherein important
negotiations are required to be made wherein the negotiators may get
bogged down in the quagmire of too many languages and language
interpreters. They can neither concentrate on the content nor can they
be utterly confident about what they have negotiated. Hence there
arises a necessity to bring down further, the number of languages; and
if necessary evolve a global language, and this has to emerge from
among the existing languages, as we know the experiments with
artificially created languages such as Esperanto, IDO et, have failed
for want of literature. A global language needs a pride of ancestry,
must be in popular use at present, and possess worthy credentials to
survive in the future.A language, which qualifies to become a global
language, must be primarily a significant one as per the criteria
mentioned earlier. But mere number of users cannot be a sufficient or
justifiable parameter to classify a language as significant , because
if that were the case we may have in that list such unheard of
languages as Wu in China , Xhosa in South Africa , Pashto in
Afghanistan , Quencha in Peru .

Amore justifiable classification would be, in addition to the number
of users of a language, its geographical spread, the wide range and
variegated vocabulary to communicate and express as many ideas or
events as possible in as many fields of human activity , it must have
the syntactic plasticity, flamboyant flexibility suited to both simple
and complex modes of expression, and an enormously evolved
derivational morphology.
If there is a language that fits into all these criteria adequately,
that is English. It stands as the unrivalled champion as a global
language. It does not mean that it is superior to all other languages
or it is without any weakness. Definitely it does not sound as sweet
as French. In fact it does not have a word for ‘Punya’ the exact
opposite of ‘sin. It has not a single word expression to countered
social and psychological aspects of life, which many other languages
even very insignificant ones have as has been wonderfully brought out
be Howard Rheingold in the book titled “They have a word for it”. Here
are a few of them; Tjotjog (Japanese) – harmonious congruence in human
affairs; Mokita (Kirinina-New Guinea) –Truth everybody knows but
nobody speaks; Yufen (Japanese)- an awareness of the universe that
triggers feelings too deep and mysterious for words; Fucha
(Polish)-using company time and money and other resources for your own
ends; it does not have the grammatical subtleties of such
insignificant languages as Chichewa, a language spoken by the
unlettered tribes of East Africa which as per the studies of Benjamin
Lee Whorf, has an extraordinary perspective on time through its two
past tenses, one for the real or objective past and another for the
subjective or mental past. The primitive tongues of Algonquin
languages have four persons in their pronouns; the metaphysically
marvelous language of Hopi Indians of Arizona reflects their excellent
view of creation; instead of a noun for ‘wave’ they have only the
participle ‘walalata(Waving). You may wonder why this long preamble
about language and canvassing for according English the status of
global language while discussing about a national language for India .
We as a nation talk of global trade, global thinking, global concern
etc. But when it comes to language
especially with so many different linguistic divisions we talk of the
importance of a national language and still hesitate to give the due
importance to a global language at least as a link language; it is
because from the earliest times we suffer from certain strong
inexplicable prejudices. Our emotionally charged feeling of patriotic
nationalism was pursued with a religious fervor to effectively drive
away the colonial bosses. Like all ferventness which turns fanatical
in function and perception and blinkered in vision, our nationalism
too, failed to see and acknowledge the good that our colonial bosses
have done.
Gandhiji managed to communicate all over India and to the world
outside through his good English.
Dr.Ambedkar drafted a wonderful Constitution with his good English.
But somewhere in the process even
Gandhiji was driven by extreme emotionalistic opposition to everything
that was British. As a result he caught hold of a rocket without
either a safe launching pad or enough space to zoom- the rocket was
Hindi-Hindustani as a national language which he pronounced for the
first time in 1934 when he founded the Bharatiya Sahitya Parishad at
Nagpur. In fact this word was supposed to have been used as early as
1892 by Bhoodev Mookerji.Later in 1945 at the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan,
scholar K.M.Munshi wanted it to be the national language of India. Why
all these men, who were very well aware that at least 40 percent of
the Indian peasants, labourers etc. are contented with their mother
tongue and are willing to serve the nation; why these honourable
leaders who owed at least a sizable part of their prominence to the
English language
(which enabled them to be preferred as negotiators with the
Britishers) all of sudden had a superfluous hypocritical need to
promote Hindi –Hindustani as a national language of administration
when English was sufficient to deal with the administration
requirements, especially more so, at a time when all the
administrators were only people with an Engllish education.
In fact by adopting English as our only official language (I mean as
higher administrative, inter-state and state-centre link language ) we
will benefit on the global level and besides we will be manifesting
our superior sense of understanding because on the one hand we would
be opposing the western approaches of divide and rule, axe and annex
policies of trying to homogenize various political systems,
proselytize other faiths, colonize countries, marginalize smaller
states, Balkanize united provinces; on the other hand we would be
welcoming what the Britisher has tried to harmonize and grow i.e. the
English language, by absorbing, assimilating and adopting words and
expressions plundered from other languages and wonderfully injecting
them not only in its literary forms but also in the layman’s lexicon.
In this lies the strength and secret of the growth of the English
language.
It is wrong to presume that a United Nationhood can be brought about
be either unity of religion or race or language. The Arab world and
Latin America are classical examples were despite all those unity,
there are so many nations. Let English be our lingua franca. Let the
Government stop wasting enormous time and money in imposing Hindi on
the whole nation. We can divert that money and time on other pressing
issues. Let not he regional linguistic, chauvinist retaliate by making
life miserable for Hindi-speaking people by putting up all important
public notices and boards only in the regional language. These acts
remind us of what Pascal wrote in his Pensees; “Man’s sensitivity to
little things and insensitivity to the greatest are the signs of
strange disorder.”
Let us remember one thing while all of us feel the need for unity,
what unity needs is feeling for all by all .Let us remember what the
great seer Bahaullah has said:” If language can help create a sense of
nationalism, it can equally well help create a sense of
internationalism.”

This appeared in the Indian currants magazine some 16 years back in my
old name v.karthikeyan

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