Monday, February 18, 2013

Gandhi, on languages

In his autobiography "My Experiments with Truth" (1927), Mahatma Gandhi wrote:
It is now my opinion that in all Indian curricula of higher education there should be a place for Hindi, Samskrit, Persian, Arabic and English, besides of course the vernacular. This big list need not frighten anyone. If our education were more systematic, and the boys free from the burden of having to learn their subjects through a foreign medium, I am sure learning all these languages would not be an irksome task, but a perfect pleasure. A scientific knowledge of one language makes a knowledge of other languages comparatively easy. In reality, Hindi, Gujarati and Sanskrit may be regarded as one language, and Persian and Arabic also as one. Though Persian belongs to the Aryan, and Arabic to the Semitic family of languages, there is a close relationship between Persian and Arabic, because both claim their full growth through the rise of Islam. Urdu I have not regarded as a distinct language, because it has adopted the Hindi grammar and its vocabulary is mainly Persian and Arabic, and he who would learn good Urdu must learn Persian and Arabic, as one who would learn good Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, or Marathi must learn Sanskrit.
Posted by Arun at 10:00 PM

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CIP · 636 weeks ago

On this subject, he is nuts.
1 reply · active 636 weeks ago
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macgupta 81p · 636 weeks ago

Perhaps. It should be noted that this observation likely arises from his efforts to learn these languages. Gandhi was never "theoretical".
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Savyasachi · 636 weeks ago

I sometimes think this is the only subject on which he was sane.
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guest · 636 weeks ago

It's amazing how nuts like CIP, who've never bothered to read Gandhi's works commit such basic errors of fact. There's a v.long section in Experiments about how Gandhi went about learning multiple languages. An eminently workable solution. In peninsular India, the idea of mother tongue may be, for all we know, a colonial imposition. Multiple languages were the rule till about 200 years ago. That's what my family records say
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CIP · 636 weeks ago

A few very talented people can learn multiple languages well, including Roy, Macaulay, and perhaps Gandhi, but most people cannot. Relatively few are even bilingual, and I would guess that not one in a ten-thousand is competent in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, English, and a couple of vernacular languages. Unless Indians happen to be uniquely talented in languages, it doesn't look like a mass educational tool to me.
4 replies · active 635 weeks ago
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macgupta 81p · 635 weeks ago

The Indian upper crust was probably bilingual throughout history.
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banerjee · 635 weeks ago

The upper crust is trilingual nowadays (English, Hindi, mother tongue or is it monolingual; English only?) and a large fraction of the population is bilingual (mother language and Hindi).
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Guest · 635 weeks ago

Let's do it this way. I will take you to Chennai by rail. We will alight at Central Station and start walking on Walltax Road, and practice our English Tamil, Hindi and Telugu. If I don't find you a tri-lingual person every 2nd person we contact, I will buy you a nice dinner. I also see that you use the word vernacular - which means "language of the homegrown slave" - a term used by the high Latin speaking Romans for the languages spoken by their imported slaves. Amusing Brits used the term vernacular for Indian languages!
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macgupta 81p · 635 weeks ago

I think "vernacular" lost its servant/slave connotations over the ages.

We should perhaps also distinguish between the spoken and written languages - though with modern software, transliteration into any script should be reasonably trivial.
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CIP · 636 weeks ago

I was particularly taking exception to the notion that Persian and Arabic were close. They are very different in grammar, structure, and vocabulary.
2 replies · active 635 weeks ago
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macgupta 81p · 636 weeks ago

True. From a modern Indian perspective, I suppose Arabic is important for the readers of the Quran; while the Persian script and vocabulary are important for all those who love Urdu.
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Guest · 635 weeks ago

CIP "Though Persian belongs to the Aryan, and Arabic to the Semitic family of languages, there is a close relationship between Persian and Arabic, because both claim their full growth through the rise of Islam."

I wish you wouldn't argue just for the heck of it
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CIP · 634 weeks ago

I can read, but I still don't agree.

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