Category: language

Name mutilation

Like Bangalore supposedly became Bengaluru a few years back (when HDK was cheap minister), West Bengal is going to change its name to “Poschim Bongo” or some such thing. Now, unlike Bombay-Mumbai or Madras-Chennai, the thing with these name changes is that they are merely globalization of local names. Let me explain.

Bombay (bom bahia or good port in Portuguese) and Mumbai (of Mumba Devi) are fundamentally different. Madras (mad race? ) and Chennai (beautiful) are again fundamentally different. While I disagree with those name changes and still prefer to call those cities by their former names, I see that the change in those names at least has some merit. They wanted to get rid of their colonial British-given names (and i’m sure Tams wanted to prove they aren’t a mad race, though they might have achieved the opposite through this action) and chose local names in the local language.

When Bangalore’s name was supposedly changed to “Bengaluru” a few years back, Kannada newspapers (I used to subscribe to Vijaya Karnataka back then) had a tough time explaining the name change. Because Bangalore has forever been known as “Bengaluru” in Kannada. Even now, when I speak in Kannada I say “Bengaluru” but I say “Bangalore” when speaking in any other language. While it might have been a noble intention by HDK and UR Ananthamurthy and others behind the name change to get the non-Kannadigas to use the Kannada name, the effect has been completely counterproductive.

Till date, I’m yet to meet someone who is not conversant in Kannada to pronounce “BengaLuru” correctly. First of all, most people can’t say the “L” sound and instead pronounce it as “l” (in Kannada that can make a profound difference. for example “hELu” is “tell” while “hElu” is “shit” ). Next (this is the problem with most North Indians), people have trouble pronouncing the short ‘e’ sound. Finally, it’s hard for people to figure out that the first U in Bengaluru is to be pronounced long and the terminal u should be pronounced short. The combination of all these means horribly messed up pronunciation, which makes one wonder why they bothered to “change” the name at all.

West Bengal doesn’t seem to have learnt from this experience of Bangalore. They want to call themselves “Poschim Bongo” it seems. Not being a bong, I’m going to have major difficulty in pronouncing that name, and I might end up pronouncing it in a way that makes most bongs cringe. I really hope they see sense before they make this name change official and opt for a saner name, if they want to change their name at all that is.

One thing they could try would be to knock that “west” off their name (I believe the Times of India has been campaigning for this). West Bengal was the primary reason that I got my directions and geography horribly wrong till I was some eight years old. I used to assume that “West Bengal” was at the western edge of India! Especially since Bangladesh is no more called “East Bengal”.

Given that they are mostly commie, one thing they could try is probably to go the East Germany or North Korea way, and name themselves “Democratic State of Bengal” or some such thing.

Remembering Names and Pattern Recognition

I spent the first half of this week attending a Pan-Asia training program in Hong Kong. Most of the people attending this program were from the Tokyo and Hong Kong offices of our firm, and most of them happened to be natives of China, Japan and Korea. It was a wonderful training program and gave much scope for networking. The biggest surprise to me, however, was about how bad I was during the two days at remembering names – something I consider myself good at.

We Indians constantly crib that westerners are usually bad at catching our names while on the other hand that we don’t have much trouble remembering their names. Thinking about it, I think name recognition is basically an exercise in pattern recognition and the ease of rememberance of a certain class of names depends on how easily we can recognize those patterns.

If you are familiar with the broad class of names of a particular ethnicity (let’s say Indian Hindu for example), you don’t really need to remember the name as a collection of syllables. You only need to know say the first letter, or an abstract concept which is what the name means, or a combination of this and it is likely that you can remember the full name.

The thing wiht western names, however, is that due to Hollywood, or sport, or colonial rule, or the fact that Indian Christians have names similar to mostly christian Westerners, most Western names are familiar to us. And because of this familiarity, it is not hard at all for us to remember the name of the average Westerner. On the contrary, due to lack of exposure, Westerners can’t recognize patterns in Indian names because of which it is hard for them to remember our names.

It is due to lack of general familiarty with Chinese and Japanese names that I found it so hard to remember names during the recent trip. There was no way I could break down names into easy combination of syllables (yeah for example Hi-ro-hi-to consists of all easy syllables, but how many people called hirohito would you know for you to remember the whole name by just remembering part of the name) and so I had the additional responsibility of remembering all the syllables in the names and the combination in which they occurred.

On a related note, a disproportionate proportion of people of Chinese origin at the training had a christian (western) first name and a chinese last name (eg. Michael Chang). But then I suppose this is because a lot of Chinese people adopt a “Western name” to make matters simple when they migrate or something (so for example, someone called Chang Sun-Wang will convert his name to Stephen Chang).

Scissors

It was our third term in IIMB. The institute had come up with this concept called “core electives” which no one had a clue about. These courses were neither core nor elective. And one of them happened to be Investments, taught by the excellent and entertaining Prof. R Vaidyanathan.

This was around the time when Kodhi and I had been trying hard to introduce the word “blade” (in the context of “putting blade” meaning “hitting on someone”) to campus. This word had been long established in Bangalore Slanguage, and we were trying to make IIMB also adopt the same. In order to further our efforts towards introducing this words, we even picked a batchmate each and actually started putting blade (ok I made that last one up).

So during the course of the class, Prof Vaidya said “the difference between a blade and scissors is that a blade cuts one way while a scissors cuts both ways”. I forget the context in which he said that, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that a collective bulb lit up in the first row, where Kodhi and I had been sitting. “Blade” now had a logical extension. A new slang-word had been born at that moment, and later that day at lunch we introduced it to the general public at IIMB.

So that is the origin of the term “scissors”. Now the title of my blog post series in “arranged scissors” might make sense for you. Scissors happens when louvvu “cuts both ways”. When a pair of people put blade on each other- they are effectively “putting scissors” with each other. So in most cases, the objective of blade is to convert it to “scissors”. And so forth.

While in the frontbenches of Prof Vaidya’s class Kodhi and I were inventing the term “scissors”, Neha Jain was in the backbenches actually putting scissors with Don. Now she has come up with a nice poem on this topic. Do read it. And I want to make a Death Metal song out of it. So if you have any nice ideas regarding the tune and appropriate umlauts, do leave a comment.

Josh

This used to be such a commonly used word back in school. To do anything you needed josh. To do anything well, you needed “full josh”. You would suddenly “get josh” to do something. And when you didn’t want to do something you’d say “josh illa” (back in school, I hardly spoke English. Used to be mostly Kannada – this was till 10th standard).

There was this friend who was hitting on a girl in the junior batch. And on every saturday, he would wait for her to come out of class to take one glimpse of her before he went home. He would say he needed to “get josh” from her. And if he didn’t see her before he left for home on saturday, he wouldn’t have enough josh to last the weekend.

There were other ways to get josh. Listening to songs from David Dhawan-Govinda movies was one way. Towards the end of school came Upendra with A – again immensely josh-giving. Everything we did, every activity we planned, had the intention of maximizing our josh inflow. Wonderful times those.

This word faded away from my lexicon when i found it not being used much in IITM. IITese however had the common word “enthu” which I realized was reasonably similar to josh – basically it was similar enough to josh that I didn’t have enough of an incentive to establish josh in IITese. And I switched. Of course there was no exact match – for example, just having a glimpse of that special someone was usually not enough to give you enthu, nor would Tan Tana Tan TanTan Tara help.

Again doing something with “full josh” wasn’t the same as doing that with “full enthu”. You could “put enthu” for something but you “needed josh” to do it.

Of late I’ve been trying to revive josh. I find myself instinctively using the word when I think it is appropriate. I’m trying to distinguish between josh and enthu, and use the one that is more appropriate. It is not easy of course – had it been, I’d’ve made an effort ot establish josh in IITese.

And now, thinking about it, I realize that there was a good chance that this blog might have been residing on some “no josh da” or “josh illa maga” website. But again – josh is not exactly the same as enthu.

Mantras: Songs Fooled By Randomness?

A couple of weeks back, I happened to read Frits Staal’s Discovering the Vedas. I was initially skeptical of the book since it has been blurbed by Romila Thapar, thinking it might be some commie propaganda, but those fears were laid to rest after I read Staal’s interpretation of the so-called “Aryan Invasion Theory” and found it quite logical. I enjoyed the first half of the book, and then lost him. I couldn’t understand anything at all in the second half of the book.

The precise moment where I lost interest in the book was when Staal gave his theory as to why mantras and rituals have no meaning. I found his reasoning of the same quite weak, and since he kept referring back to that later in the book, it became tough to follow. Staal states the following three reasons to claim that mantras precede language, and they are more like bird calls.

  • Mantras are language independent: Anything in language can be translated whereas mantras remain the same in all languages.
  • Mantras, even though they seem to be in a language like Sanskrit, are not used for their meaning.
  • Mantras follow patterns, like refrain, which is not seen in language.

While I find the hypothesis interesting, the proof that Staal gives is hopelessly inadequate. The Beatles might have translated their songs into German, but songs are normally not translated, right? You don’t translate songs, and sing  them into the same tune, unless you are doing some MTV Fully Faltoo or some such thing. On the other hand, what if the songs are in a language that is completely alien to you? There is no way you can translate them, but since you like them you sing them anyway. Without bothering to know their meaning. And songs can definitely have refrain, right? It clearly seems like Staal is trying to force-fit something here. Hopefully he is force-fitting this here so as to prove some other theory of his. But you can never say.

As I had expected, Staal’s theory has caught the attention of the right-wing blogosphere. JK at Varnam writes

This athirathram, which was extensively covered in Malayalam newspapers, was highly respectful and the words I heard were not “playful” or “pleasurable.” I can understand singing for pleasure, but am yet to meet a priest who said, “it’s a weekend and raining outside, let’s do a ganapati homam for pleasure.”

Sandeep at sandeepweb goes one step further, and says:

Even a Hindu not well-versed with the nuances of Mantra intuitively senses that something “divine” or “other-worldly” is associated with every Mantra. In a very crude sense, a Mantra is to some people, a cost-benefit equation: you chant the Gayatri Mantra for spiritual upliftment, the Maha Mrityunajaya to ward off the fear of death, the Surya Mantras for health, and so on. Why, you chant just the “primordial sound(sic),” “OM” to get yet another benefit. Whether these benefits really accrue or or not is not the point. What is immediately discernible is that every mantra is associated with some God or principle. In other words, it has a very specific meaning.

I think mantras are simply songs, in an ancient language, fooled by randomness. As I had explained before I quoted JK and Sandeep, going by Staal’s hypothesis, and the precise reasons that he gives, it is not inconceivable that mantras were composed as songs, in a language that hasn’t survived. In fact, Staal’s “proof” can better explain the song hypothesis rather than a no-language hypothesis. I don’t know why those songs were composed, and I definitely won’t rule out the possibility that they were meant to be devotional (after all, a large amount of later Indian music (including all of Carnatic music) is fundamentally devotional). Anyways the exact reasons for composition may not matter.

So what might have happened is this. I suppose chanting of mantras and conducting rituals was a fairly common event in the Vedic age. I believe that we started off with a much larger repository of mantras and rituals compared to what survive today. And the ones that survive are the ones that were lucky enough to have been associated with certain good events. A chieftan happened to do a certain ritual before going to battle, which he happened to win. And this ritual came to become the “pre-war” ritual. Of course it wouldn’t have been one single event that would have established this as “the” pre-war ritual, but after a couple of “successive trials”, this would have become the definitive pre-war ritual.

Once a particular ritual or mantra got associated with a particular event, then reinforcement bias kicked in. Since it was now “established”, any adverse results were seen as being “in spite of”. Suppose a king dutifully did the pre-war ritual before he got thrashed in battle, people would say “poor guy. in spite of religiously doing his rituals he has lost”. The establishment meant that no one would question the supposed effectiveness of the ritual. And so forth for other mantras and rituals.

To summarize, we started off with a significantly larger number of mantras than we have today. Association of certain mantras with certain “good events” meant two things. One, they got instantly associated with such good events, and two, they got preference in propagation – limited bandwidth of oral tradition meant only a certain number could be passed on sustainably, and these “lucky mantras” (notice the pun – they brought luck, and they survived) became the “chosen ones”.

The sad part in the whole deal is that mantras were taught without explaining the meaning (similarly wiht rituals). Maybe the oral tradition didn’t permit too much bandwidth, and in their quest to learn the maximum number of mantras possible, people gave short shrift to the meanings. And by the time writing was established, the language had changed and the meaning of the mantras lost forever. In fact, this practice of mugging up mantras also gets reflected in the way education happens in India today, with an emphasis on knowledge rather than understanding. I suppose I’ll cover that in a separate blog post.

On Booze and Language of Thought

Last Sunday, I was having a discussion with my mother about my drinking – which has been sporadic at best and non-existent at worst. She said she had a probelm with even my sporadic ingestion of alcohol, and demanded that I completely give up drinking. I tried my best to draw it away from a religious/emotional argument, and tried to draw her into a logical argument.

My mother is a biologist by training (it is another matter that her career was in accounting) and said that she is concerned about her gene, and that given that I’m her only offspring, she naturally has incentive in my offspring, and she wants to make sure that they’ll be in good health, and live well. She also has this notion that if either of the parents drink, the children will be born dumb, and there is an increased risk of abnormality. I have no clue about these matters, and somehow managed to change the line of argument.

Then she released her brahmastra. Or what she thought was her brahmastra. Everyone she know who drank alcohol, she said, had ended up becoming a drunkard and a wifebeater. She gave examples of classmates from school, colleagues, colleagues’ husbands, relatives, etc. It was evident that she had prepared her argument well. And in each of these cases, there was no doubt that the person in question was a drunkard and a wifebeater, whose kids were most likely to end up as losers.

It is pertinent to point out here that the entire argument was happening in Kannada. In fact, I’ve never talked to either of my parents, or to any other close relatives, in any other language. I am in general fairly fluent at the language, at least at the Bangalore version which includes loads of English words. I have in general managed to hold my own in several debates and discussions at social gatherings, while talking exclusively in Kannada. I have explained to relatives complicated financial products, and how the sub-prime crisis unraveled, all in Kannada.

Getting back to the argument, the best way for me to handle my mother’s examples was to provide counterexamples. Of perfectly decent people who consumed alcohol. For statistical reasons and given the way the hopothesis had gotten framed, I would need a much larger list than my mother had produced. And in the spur of the moment, I decided that I wouldn’t do a good job at listing and I should continue with logic-based arguments. Phrases such as “selection bias” and “Bayes’ theorem” and “one-way implications” flashed across my head.

Holding up your end of the debate when you aer talking nomally, and in Kannada, is fair enough. However, when you are extremely animated, and speaking at 100 words per minute, things are a bit harder. I realized that my mother would understand none of the jargon that had flashed across my head, and I’d have to explain to her in normal language. My mouth was processing words at 100 words per minute, and suddenly my brain seemed to have gotten a bit slower. The pipeline became empty for a moment and i started stammering. And my mother started making fun of my stammering (i used to stammer a lot when I was a kid. took a lot of effort to get over it).

Coming to the crux of this essay – at this moment another thought flashed to my head. For a long time I wasn’t sure if I thought in any specific language, or if my thought was general. And even if I thought in a particular language, I wasn’t sure if I thought in Kannada or in English. I had always done well enough in both languages to keep this debate unresolved. Now there was the data point. The clinching data point. I quickly realized that had I been speaking in English, my pipeline wouldn’t have gone empty. In fact, when I was trying to explain stuff to my mom, I was doing two levels of translation – I was first translating jargon into normal English, and then translating that into Kannadal. Powerful evidence to sugggest that I think in English.

I was so kicked by this discovery that the original argument didn’t matter to me any more. I quickly promised my mother that I will never consume alcohol again, and she said “shiom”, a kid-word that means something like “ok what you’ve said is final and binding and no changing it”. So I suppose that is how things will stay. I will henceforth stop consuming alcohol. Not that I’ve been consuming much nowadays – average one drink every two months or so. It won’t be hard at all to make the transition.

PS: Interestingly, when I’m trying to speak in any Indic langauge (Hindi, Tamil, etc.) I instinctively form my thoughts in Kannada and then translate. Maybe it is because of similarities that the cost of translation from Kannada to these languages is much lower than the cost of translation from English, that it becomes profitable for me to think in Kannada, which is harder than to think in English.

Slender Loris and Punny Animal Names

I think one of my cousins ( a very young fellow) looks like a Slender Loris, and refer to him by that name. Unfortunately, I can’t make the nickname official because of a punny reason.

The Kannada word for Slender Loris is “Kaadupaapa” which is supposed to mean “baby of the forest” or some such thing. The problem arises with the word “Kaadu” which can refer to both forest and as “troublesome”. I suppose the reason for these diverse meanings is some sort of root meaning “wild”.

So Kaadupaapa can also mean “troublesome baby”. There’s more to it. “Kaadupaapa” also happens to be a fairly common abuse that is directed at young kids when they get too troublesome. I clearly remember my mother abusing me using this phrase a few times when I was small. So nicknaming a young boy as Kaadupaapa would be similar to some guy in IIT being given a nickname such as “bastard” or “chutiya”. And clearly the parents of the kid will not approve and the baptist will end up getting a bad name in their eyes.

This unfortunate combination of circumstances means that I can’t make official what I think is a splendid nickname. At least, in IIT I didn’t have to bother about what the parents of the boys would think about the nicknames that I’d dole out, which enabled me to dish out a few decent ones. Though I admit that a conspiracy by the institute to deny freshies to Narmada Hostel meant that there weren’t too many people I could have named.

why is the level of English in North India so low?

I had sent this mail to a mailing list of 60-odd super-intelligent people. unfortunately, in their fondness for Savita Bhabhi, Vidarbhan farmers and child-eating, they weren’t able to come up with any convincing explanation for this. So I thought you super-intelligent readers of my blog might be able to help. I begin.

Three months back I moved to Gurgaon from Bangalore. And one thing I’ve noticed is that here practically no one can speak English. I’m referring to service providers here, people who are typically from the lower middle class. Taxi driver. Electrician. Waiter. Accountant. etc.

None of them can speak a word of English, and  I mean that almost literally. In Bangalore and Madras, we can see that people in these professions at least make an effort to speak English, and even if you don’t know their local tongue you will be able to communicate with them and get your work done. Here, unless you know Hindi, it is impossible. There is only so much you can communicate in Dumb Charades, right?

I suppose one argument will be that people in the North would have never had the need to learn English since most people they come across can speak Hindi. And that since linguistic regions are much smaller in the South, there is greater incentive for people to pick up and learn new languages. And since they know that a knowledge of English helps get them more business, they make an effort to pick it up.

But again – even if you exclude those who haven’t gone to school, the knowledge of English here is horrible. Isn’t it aspirational in North India to send kids to English medium schools? If not, I wonder why this is the case – given that in the South practically everyone want to send their kids to English medium schools.

Ok here is my hypothesis – remember that it is a hypothesis and not an argument. I wonder if people who are native of regions where the same language prevails over a large geographical area are linguistically challenged. because everyone they need to interact with know their language and there is no need for them to learn any new language. and this affects their ability to pick up new languages. on the other hand, people from linguistically diverse regions will tend to find it easier to pick up new languages.

extending this, it might actually help if the medium of instruction in your school is not your native tongue. having learnt a new language early, you will find it easier to pick up new languages as you go along.

sometime last month I was at a high-end restaurant with a couple of friends. spoke to the waiter in English and he didn’t understand. one of my friends who was with me said “don’t bother talking to these guys in English. if they knew some english, they’d’ve been working for Genpact and not become waiters”

IIMB culture seems to be dying

On Saturday I had the opportunity to interact with a few not-so-young first year students (fachas) from IIMB. The interaction was, in general, good, but I came back disappointed. , disappointed that IIMB culture as we knew it was on their way out.

These people hardly use BRacket. Some of them don’t even know what is Arbit. It is reported that they hardly play tsepak nowadays. And it might be a biased sample that I met, but most of them hadn’t attended more than one or two L^2s in their first term (there are usually about five or six L^2s in a term). If people put NED for drunken partying, I dont’ know what they will put enthu for. The list is endless…

The more shocking bit was their absolute ignorance of IIMB lingo. One fachi kept saying “strong da” but that was about it. Great institutions that we had introduced – such as “are”, “K” and “NED” – didn’t seem to find a place in their vocabulary. In fact, when I happened to say K2U to one of them (the same fachi who kept saying “strong da..”) they all gave me strange looks.

In their defence, the fachas claimed that no one had taught them. That no one had taught them to use BRacket, to use IIMB lingo, to play Tsepak, or what arbit is. And I admit this is one problem with a two year course – every batch is a “cut vertex” in the cultural chain. One useless batch and the entire chain which had been painstakingly built up gets broken. And there is only so much that a handful of interested alumni can do. It is the responsibility of the incumbent senior batch to ensure that the essential knowledge is transferred to their juniors.

At a high-level meeting of representatives of batches of 06 and 07 held in Mumbai on Sunday, it ws decided that it is imperative to take urgent steps in order to resurrect the great IIMB culture. A resolution was unanimously passed to condemn certain practices and language followed by the current first year batch. A decision was taken that we need to start an education and training program for the current inhabitants of the institute. How far we will succeed, no one knows.

One last thing. The fact that the fachas didn’t know about K was bad enough. When I looked at the blank look on their faces and proceeded to explain the great concept, one bright fachi (no, not the one who kept saying “strong da…”) interjected “oh it’s just like saying something is ‘gay'”. And the rest of the fachas and fachis enthusiastically agreed.

Bongobondhus

On Sunday I got my new house cleaned. Some three bongs came to do the job and the first thing they wanted was some consumables. “Tezaab, saarof aur bhim powder”, one of them said. The first was understandable – I clearly remember from the posters of the Anil Kapoor – Madhuri Dixit starrer (incidentally the first ever hindi movie i saw) that “Tezaab is acid”. But saarof and bhim? I thought it was something local to Gurgaon. So I took one of them along to the shop.

It turned out that he wanted Surf and Vim. It seems I was too late to put on my “bong filter” .

I must say they did an excellent job of cleaning (and they better have done, for the small fortune they charged me for it). Finally I ask them where their names and where they are from. One of them had disappeared by then. The others gave their name as “bhokto” and “orjun”. And they said they are from Kolkota. I asked them if they are from Kolkota or from Bangladesh, and they immediately pulled out their Election Voter ID Cards to ostensibly prove they are Indians!