Prof. B. M. Hegde,
Pro Vice Chancellor,
MAHE University,
Manipal-576 119.
“Great minds
discuss ideas,Average minds discuss events,
Small minds
discuss people.”
Anon.
One should
only open any of the articles in some of the present day newspapers and
magazines to see how the English language is being abused and misused
relentlessly. One of the common sins committed by the so-called new stars in
the literary horizon is sesquipedalia. They could be aptly called
sesquipedalians. This is a very telling
word, which tells the whole story of people who write to impress with words
that the common reader does not understand. This tendency had been discouraged
even in the olden days, resulting in the birth of the word sesquipedalian. It
was coined to describe long-winded words in any communication, where much
shorter words would do as well, if not better. It was Mark Twain who once said;
“
the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the
difference between lightning bug and lightening.” How true!
The idea of writing any literary or communication piece is to convey our thoughts to the reader, and not to show that the writer knows some bombastic words in the English language. R.K.Narayan, in my opinion the best non-Caucasian writer in English, uses such simple words and has a special way of handling them that even a high school drop out could read and enjoy his books. If one compared that with the present day Pulitzers and Bookers, one would get a cultural and linguistic shock.
Let us get to
the bottom of the word sesquipedalia.
It was the Roman poet, Horace, which first described this word. These
are words which are a foot and a half long! The prefix, sesqui, comes from Latin root, one and a half. The word, at times,
is used to describe any function got up to celebrate the one hundred fiftieth
years, sesquicentennial. Again the word “sesqui”
could have come from the Latin semi,
that means half. The suffix pedalian
comes from Latin root pes, which
denotes the foot. Thus the whole thing,
put together, becomes one and a half-foot. How did the words foot and foot ruler come about?
Could it be that the human foot in the olden days was that long? The
other connected words are pedal-
something that one presses under the foot to control some machine; pedestrian-one who walks on foot; centipede-one which walks on hundred
feet; millipede-one that walks on
thousand feet, impede – to obstruct;
etc.
Any language
should grow by borrowing words from many other languages. English language
leads the way here. Original English does not even have a script. It was,
probably, an offspring of the marriage between the local Gaelic, spoken by the
inhabitants of the English Isles in the eleventh century, when the invading
Normans brought with them their French. Gaelic itself came from Hungarian. More
than half of the words in the present day English came from other languages.
The other half could be rightly called Anglo-Saxon in origin. Many Indian
languages will have to learn this lesson from English in not being too narrow
minded in using common words from other languages, that the common man
understands, instead of trying to find a long-winded new word in their own
language.
English
tolerates any type of distortion of their language, and rightly so. The
Americans, proud as they are, would want to change even the spellings of many
English words, in addition to adding words to that language. Even the word
sesquipedalian should have been sesquipaedalian
in true English style. English language has even borrowed many Indianised
English words into their language. While co-brother and pre-pone are the two
glaring examples of Indian English now being absorbed into the addendum to the
Oxford Dictionary, they have even gone a step further in saying that “ grammar
and dictionaries are there to record common usage and not to dictate
them.” (Norman Vincent of Cambridge University.)
This is in
sharp contrast to our languages, especially that great language of all times,
now even accepted as the mother of all Indo-European languages, Sanskrit. The
latter was kept under very rigid grammatical rules and regulations that the
common man lost touch with the language and its richness. Sanskrit could enrich
any man’s existence on this planet. While I am at this topic a very funny
incident comes to mind. The incident shows how we blindly adore our languages
to the point of being fanatical, and also shows, at the same time, how callous
we, as a Nation, are in spending the poor taxpayer’s money.
I was once a
part of the Govt. of India’s commission to try and teach medicine in Indian
languages, like Hindi. I accepted the assignment thinking that it would be an
opportunity to have intellectual stimulation, in addition to getting to know
Hindi better. I never realized that I would be in for an unpleasant surprise!
The commission had my former Dean at the Stanley Medical College, Madras as the
chairman. There were ten Hindi and ten Sanskrit pundits as permanent members. I
was one of the five invited members to assist the commission as a medical
scientist.
I was paid
rupees one hundred fifty per diem allowance, in addition to my airfare to Delhi
and back. I would not know how much were the other members paid! It must have
been a substantial sum at that time-I is talking of the early 1960s. The first
meeting lasted for two full weeks. At every stage the discussion would be
mainly on the etymology and the syntax etc. of both Sanskrit and Hindi, and at
no stage did the debate take on any intellectual problems. At the end of two
long weeks, we succeeded in translating two words only. They were aanthr-brahadanthrakoshtak
and aanthra-aanthrakoshtak. The original Greek words were
entero-colostomy and entero-enterostomy.
I went up to
the chairman, my former Dean, and tendered my resignation from the commission
after the first meeting, as I thought it was both foolish and a waste of money
to go on with this exercise as we were barking up the wrong tree. Medicine is
full of Greek and Latin words, and there are hardly any English words. All over
the English speaking world, and also in countries like France, Germany, Italy,
and even Russia medicine is taught in their own languages but the words are the
same Greek and Latin words. None of those countries tried to change them into
their own languages. One could easily teach medicine in Hindi, or, for that
matter, in any Indian language using the same Greek and Latin words. In
addition to being foolish to search for an equivalent word in Hindi for the
Latin and Greek words, one would make the new medical studies very cumbersome
with those new long-winded words, the sesquipedalia.
The chairman
lost his cool on seeing my resignation; he was feeling sorry that a junior
teacher like me should have to refuse to be on an all India Commission- a
prestigious one at that. He even told me that I was selected mainly because I
was his student and he knew me well. I had to pacify him and eventually got out
of it. To cut the long story short, the commission died a natural death after a
couple of years. I am told, could not verify though, that they succeeded in
translating only a couple of dozens of words in those two years. Each one of
that sesquipaedalia should have cost the taxpayer a handsome amount!
This kind of
fanaticism in language does not even serve the cause of the language, not to
speak of its growth, in the first place. Mankind is but one large family and
language, in my humble opinion, is only a vehicle for communication. The easier
it is the better for the recipient. The final idea is to convey the thoughts in
one man’s head to others. The birds and the animals have their own language,
but that is the language of love. Man, with his proclivity for comfort and
greed, is turning language into one of the tools to hate another man. We seem
to enjoy hating one another in the name of religion, caste, creed, language,
geographic boundaries, and what have you. This tendency is the result of our
having the present political system of nations and regions, each one hating the
other-competing with one another for one-upmanship.
Man is here
as a small part of this macrocosm. He can not exist in isolation. He is never
independent, but is always interdependent. How could one, then, have
differences in such small matters like language? Today man is fighting
M.A.N-Man, Animal, and Nature. This can not go on for a very long time. We have
to change this tendency. Right thinking people, who have no stakes in politics
and power, could only do this. I hope
wisdom will dawn on us sooner than late, as the time is running out. Our future
generations would certainly hold us responsible for their ills, mainly due to
our destroying Nature for our narrow ends. The final remedy for all this is to
bring man and man together in this world! Long live mankind on this
planet.
“ When your bow is broken and your last
arrow spent,
Then shoot, shoot with your whole heart.”
Zen
Philosophy.