Parallel English Proposal.

Tue Feb 14 02:11:11 UTC 2012

VYAKARAN: South Asian Languages and Linguistics Net
Editors:  Tej K. Bhatia, Syracuse University, New York
          John Peterson, University of Osnabrueck, Germany
Details:  Send email to listserv at listserv.syr.edu and say: INFO VYAKARAN
Subscribe:Send email to listserv at listserv.syr.edu and say:
          SUBSCRIBE VYAKARAN FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME
          (Substitute your real name for first_name last_name)
Archives: http://listserv.syr.edu

Dear Satheeshkumar (Kerala, India)..  Date 13 Feb 2012

Your reply is interesting and informative. By way of reply,
I write this to myself (for convenience) with Bcc to you and
some thinkers. (I may repeat later to other thinkers).

Druid, a community in ancient Britain has some name-similarity 
with Dravid. But that is not the only point. My loose querry was 
on other similarities. English has counting system thirtyone, thirtytwo, 
thirtythree in cyclic series. No gender effect on adjectives, verbs. 
He went, She went, It went. Good man, good woman, good child.
Same thing in Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, called Dravidian
languages in India. North Indian languages are complex in this matter. 
Hindi has 2 genders MF even for nouns of inanimate objects. Marathi 
is more complex, with 3 genders MFN.

English carries short-duration, long-duration vowels, as in kin-keen, 
let-late, pull-pool. Meaning of words depends on duration. Same
thing in Dravidian languages. Except for few words like (din-deen), 
this short-duration, long-duration difference is on paper and has 
only complicated grammar of north Indian  languages. (kavee = Poet), 
(kavitaa = Poem) in Marathi language. (ee) changes to (i). It does not 
matter, if I write (kavi = Poet) when Romanizing Marathi.

Some thoughts on English are in E01, E02 and few similarities in
Indian languages, in E15, on my website (www.mngogate.com) 
E04 deals with Roman Lipi Parishad that failed, but concept is not
dead. We, in India, use (abcd) etc for phone books, theater rows,
stock market pricelists, vehicle number plates, vitamin names, etc.
Except few Arabic nations (I am unsure, but I am so informed), the
Roman-script based chemical  symbols are used  in non-Roman
languages like Greek, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Tamil etc.

Your other observations on simplification of languages are stimulating. 
Languages do change, but that is not easy simply because they are used 
by millions of people, in millions of books, newspapers, roadsigns etc.
Every dictionary is then like holy religious book and every school is like
holy place of worship. (Only analogy, no disrespect to anyone). Every
educated (immersed in tradition) person has vested interest in making no 
changes. So you just cannot modify spelling of  "Right" on roadsigns,
dictionaries, newspapers etc. And so all talks of spelling reforms fail.

But change of script is a golden chance for reforms. We throw off 
unwanted silent (p) while writing (pneumonia) in Marathi script.
Word (sarakaara = Government) as per transliteration (silent "a" 
after "r" ) of Marathi script, is simplified (sarkaar) in Roman script.

One thing is sure. Mankind needs an easy link language. Years and
old generations have passed. Technology has given many slaps to 
beliefs. English is not now " Imperial, Particular-Religion " language.
As you say, India might play some role to evolve that link language.

-- Madhukar

--- On Sat, 11/2/12, Satheesh Kumar <satheekumar at yahoo.com> wrote:

From: Satheesh Kumar <satheekumar at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Parallel English proposal.
To: "Madhukar N. Gogate" <mngogate1932 at yahoo.com>
Date: Saturday, 11 February, 2012, 10:48 PM

Dear Gogate,

I m also sorry for the delay in replyng. I was little busy with a completely unrelated project.
First of all let me thank you for calling me up in the midst of your busy schedule.
-----------------------------
Dravidian Languages
------------------------------

First of all, I would like to clear your doubt regarding Dravidian languages. Even though, as you said, Dravidian languages has no 'gender case' like Hindi, they are totally unrelated to European languages. Bengali even though a Hindi like language has no 'gender cases'.  Dravidian languages follow an SOV order as in Hindi and not an SVO order. These languages are word to word translatable from Hindi.

But your assumption that Dravidians have a European origin seems to be partially correct. Its not actually Europe, but Asia Europe border area. The researches so far shows that Dravidians originated in the Mesopotamian region (which includes present day Turkey and Syria) , from there sailed across the water (drava=water) to reach western coast of northern Kerala. This people, I don't think have any connection with the druids except for phonetic similarity that 'barber' and 'harbor' have.

Dravidians, as a race is not what most north Indians mean by the word "Madrasi". And majority of people who speak draviadian language are not Dravidians. Most of the present day Tamil speakers are 'Australoids' who had settled  in south Indian peninsula before the arrival of Dravidians. And even today they are the majority race here. They just acquired the Dravidian's language. 

------------------------------------
Spelling Unification and democracy (India)

------------------------------------
As you said people in general don't like a rapid change, and because they consider roman alphabet as foreign, they might not accept it. The change should come gradually. Creating a new set of spelling rules and asking people to follow them from the next day onwards seems to be an Utopian idea.I remember you said once, Marathi folks don't seems to accept a shift from Marathi to roman. But in Kerala such a transformation is possible now-a-days and actually its taking place automatically.
The previously generation ( corresponding to yours) were taught to read Malayalam (not to write). The entire state started reading news papers and magazines. Magazine with love stories can attract women. We call such magazines "ma books". The news papers and 'ma books' made them aware of the importance of English education in India. So they sent their children to school. Because our computers has roman scripts and not Indian scripts, they started writing in Malayalam using roman scripts. Most of our personal emails are in roman script. This might be true even in other states, but the difference is that, the ENTIRE population below 40 years from top to bottom of the society uses roman script in more than 50 percent of their day to day writing.( to be frank, I forgot how to write many alphabets in Malayalam even though i can read them) I am sure the next generation will used exclusively the roman script.

So, its a gradual process and first step is not education the "new spelling" but educating "the need for new spelling". The old people who don't  know the roman script must find it difficult to learn all of a sudden. Older brains are slow learners. So lets target the next generation.

--------------------------------------
Why don't they want parallel English
--------------------------------------
As you said most people don't welcome the idea of parallel English. People who know English don't want to change, and people don't know English can not figure out what we are talking about.

So instead of the phrase 'parallel English' we have to use something like 'simplified English' seems to be more socially acceptable. It must include a radical simplification of grammar and spelling rules, and teach this English through various Indian mother tongues ( through a booklet) or something to 1000 million Indians who don't know English but badly want to learn.

Initially it would work at least with shop keepers and shopkeepers of major cities ( especially in multilingual south Indian cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Cochin) who daily loose a big share of sales just because they can not communicate in English. I am not so fluent in Hindi, still I can speak, bargain, fight, and curse someone in Hindi for which I use only 5 tenses and 5 sentence connectors. It works well. I traveled even to north Indian villages. I never experienced any communication gap.

Such a simple but very USEFUL ENGLISH will be welcomed all over India. And a radical spelling reformation is posssible along with that. When we have the major share of the world's population with majority of them being youngsters that no other country on the surface of the world not going to have for the next 50 years,combined with an express speed economic growth, and being the country with an immediate need of a link language, I think India is the best place to start a linguistic revolution. 1200 million population, multilingustic in a phase of urbanization and mixing up. That really counts.

Once, its done, India will be the worlds largest English speaking population ( even today only US is ahead. not UK. Its the third). So in a future world most of the English language publications will be from India. So a revised spelling if its accepted in India, would spread worldwide.

--------------------------------------
Spelling reformation  and Globish
--------------------------------------
As mentioned above, a SIMPLIFIED ENGLISH can act as a vehicle to carry the of spelling reformations you are working hardly with. As you said we are not Turkey and we don't have a Kemal. So we need a DEMOCRATIC SPELLING!! 

I would like to tell you a case study of Malayalam language spellings. Being on the western coast, Kerala has been under constant influence from foreign cultures and languages for a millenia. First came the Arabs, Then St.Thomas, and then the Portugeese. Depending on the region where they landed, the language mixed up and charecteristic pronunciation variants came in to existance. Just because every group of people were influencial either by number or by economy, a spelling unification was almost impossible. So Malayalam adopted a FLEXIBLE SPELLING. For example "povoo" is also spelled as "pokoo". "Ethraya" is also spelled as "Ethrya". All these spelling variants are considered correct. Even though I presented roman spellings, its has originally started for traditional spellings, now a days the roman spellings for Malayalm too follow this flexibility.

So I think your "daukter" must have acceptible variations like "dokter" or "dakter".

-----------------------------------------

Thank You
Satheesh Kumar
+919846036148

From: Madhukar N. Gogate <mngogate1932 at yahoo.com>
To: stbett at yahoo.com; valerie.yule at bigpond.com; satheeshkumarmv at gmail.com 
Sent: Saturday, 11 February 2012 3:09 PM
Subject: Parallel English proposal.

Sorry, I was too busy (and am still busy) with other
urgent matters. But I was in talk with some Marathi
folks, Hindi folks, Gujarati folks and so on. I do not
find any interest among them for a Parallel English.
But that is how things stand when someone starts
with a new alternative. Columbus too was ridiculed.

A uniform scheme is ideal, but looks unachievable
in our democratic setups. No Kemal, as in Turkey.

I find a good interest among Marathi people for a
parallel Marathi in Roman script. So I may try for a
parallel English, with Marathi perspective & needs.
Better to get experience and achieve some results.
(Rubber, Cement, Paper, Cat, Dog) will be spelled
in Marathi as (rabar, siment', pepar, kaet', d'aog). 
I need mark  ( ' ), which I tried to avoid in Globish.

Refer E15 in (www.mngogate.com) Its link is
(www.mngogate.com/e15.htm) -- Madhukar

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/vyakaran/attachments/20120213/c18b0fb9/attachment.htm>