There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.
Posted by bmhegde on 1
Dear Ms. Fiona Godlee,
I think your ruminations about the name of the journal and its role in future is timely as the world has shrunk into a small neighbourhood. However, we have to rise up to the occasion to transform this world into a large brotherhood. The Great British Empire, which never saw the sun set in the good old days, has shrunk to just England (politically) where the sun rises occasionally. That should not mean that the influence of a journal of the stature of BMJ should diminish. On the contrary, BMJ is the best general medical journal today. If you dam a river the water stagnates; running water is beautiful water. BMJ should be running water. A permanent state of transition is human kind’s most noble condition.
If you call it English Medical Journal, BMJ might lose its moorings as English has become international as a language, although applied to the race BMJ is still English. English language has grown so fast, thanks to its broadmindedness. English freely absorbs words from every language in the world and today English has a minority of Anglo-Saxon words compared to all the words from many other languages. American English was born because more people spoke that English in the US compared to Britain at one stage. It made very good business sense to officially recognize American English with program in place of programme, line for Que and elevator for the lift! The birth of the BASIC English (British American Scientific International Communication) with very few words in the vocabulary was also a commercial necessity. I like English language because it uses its dictionary and grammar more to record common usage rather than to dictate it, as in many other puritanical languages.
The future of English will be Indian English as, in the next fifty odd years, nearly 700-800 million Indians, the future youth educated in English, will be speaking that language. The only difference will be that it will not be one single language, thanks to diversity of people in India and their regional slang. I would like to call it as the English with an “I”. India would then be the largest English speaking country in the world: per force, Indian English will be officially recognised. The English spoken by a Punjabi would be different from the one spoken by a Tamilian, for example-they could be called Pinglish and Tinglish respectively! Changing BMJ’s name to English Medical Journal, therefore, will not be a wise idea, taking the rapid metamorphosis of that language unless one wants BMJ to belong to a particular race.
Call it what you will but let the BMJ, the leader in that category of medical journals, retain its excellence, sheen and leadership, serving the whole of mankind equally, sharing and caring for mankind’s woes of pain, disability and death, the three problems all over, Britain included, for all times to come, the medical profession notwithstanding.