मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Twisted Construction, Intricate Compounds and Linguistic Hell

My 13 year old son Jaydutt Kulkarni goes to an English medium school at Pune and struggles, like most of his classmates, with Marathi language syntax- called Shuddhalekhan-“chaste writing”- in Marathi. My wife and I express horror seeing some of his bloomers. He does not make such mistakes writing English. Surprisingly, he does not make them in Hindi too. Mind you, we all speak Marathi at home and live in Marathi speaking neighbourhood.

Therefore, I wonder what the real problem is. Has it anything do with the structure and/or teaching of the language?

D D Kosambi has an interesting take ("An Introduction to the study of Indian History", Popular Prakashan, 1956-2004) on grammar of mother language of Marathi - Sanskrit.

“…The founder of Sanskrit grammar was Panini, who combined the efforts of many predecessors with his own profound observations to give us the oldest scientific grammar known anywhere in the world….Nevertheless Panini killed all preceding grammatical systems, nearly killed further development of the language…
Floridity became increasingly a characteristic of Sanskrit so that the use of twisted construction, intricate compounds, innumerable synonyms, over-exaggeration make it more and more difficult to obtain the precise meaning from a Sanskrit document…

The distinction between Sanskrit and Arabic in this respect should also be considered. Arab works on medicine, geography, mathematics, astronomy, practical sciences were precise enough to be used in their day from Oxford to Malaya. Yet Arabic too had been imposed with a new religion upon people of many different nationalities. The difference was that ‘Arab’ literati were not primarily a disdainful priest-caste. Those who wrote were not ashamed to participate in trade, warfare, and experimental science, not to write annals…”

“Intricate compounds” remind me of a scene from Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” (1940). The scene is tyrant Hynkel making a long speech and his secretary typing up just a couple of words; then saying just a couple of words only for her to type furiously many paragraphs.

Vasant Sarwate’s वसंत सरवटे picture below is equally funny. The boss has started dictating a Marathi letter to his secretary and instead of airing some meaningful matter, has ended up explaining how every single letter of every single word should be written.

Is this linguistic hell? I am sure at least my son currently feels it that way!



Artist: Vasant Sarwate वसंत सरवटे (Source- “Khada Maraycha Jhala Tar….!”, Mauj Prakashan, 1963 – collection of his cartoons from 1950 - 1962)
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

हे!!1तुमाला मराठी येते!! तुम्ही मराठीत काबरा ल्हिवना...मराठीत ल्हिवल्या वर छान वाट ते... ही साइट पहा http://quillpad.in/marathi/ ,मराठीत ल्हिवना फार सोप्पा आहे हेच्याना

August 3, 2007 at 1:56 PM

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