Why do we write the way we write? The author in this article (requires login and you get to read good stuff once you register for free) says people tend to write intricate language when they are not comfortable with it or when they write it as a foreign language. Of course his gripe is the way the English language has metamorphosed into a hotchpotch language with it assimilating words from all over the world. In India we have our own versions of Hinglish, Pinglish and Binglish.
I don’t think there is anything wrong in it as long the entire meaning is not twisted. This phenomenon of new words entering the English language is not a recent one. You can find so many French, German and other European language words in English.
Language is a tool for communication and we shouldn’t bother much about its purity. People these days travel all over the world within a span of a few hours. One gets expose to so many languages, and this reminds me a recent thing my sister told me about her daughter, TP, who will be 3 years old in May 2005. TP’s maid is from Bengal. All the time when my sister is at her office, the maid talks to her in Bengali. When my sister comes home, she talks to TP in Punjabi, and when my sister’s friends are around, they talk to TP in Hindi.
One day when she was insisting on going somewhere, TP said, “Aithe jaibo!”
Aithe in Punjabi means some place, for instance, “I want to go here,” becomes, “I want to go aithe.”
Jaibo in Bengali means to go, for instance, “I want to go here,” becomes, “I want to jaibo here.”
So you see, a new language seems to be evolving here that is a mixture of Punjabi and Bengali. Even when she was here recently, I observed she uses words from all three languages: Hindi, Punjabi and Bengali.
Although my family is from Punjab and at home we speak in Punjabi (Alka is from UP so she and I talk in Hindi to each other), lots of Hindi has crept into the way we talk. Even English words have become commonplace. This is how perpetually languages evolve and nothing can stop it. There are some pure languages like Sanskrit and Latin but then they are the mother languages and most of the civilized languages have come out of these two languages.
{ 1 comment }
This is an interesting post.
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