Many English(es)

This is the story of English in two thousand words, though I am impudent enough to write one. My identity as a teacher of English (or communication (s)kills?) does not necessarily authenticate this article. This article came out of certain compulsions of being in the droll pool rhapsody of ‘anyonecanlearnenglish’, ‘anyonecanteachenglish’, ‘anyonecanreadwritespeakenglish’- over me all the time, I caught the enthusiasm from the wind . It was pretty infectious till I decided to book myself a democratic space among the brouhaha of the mix of critics, defenders, speakers, learners, teachers, non-learners (with an apology), etc. Hence, this article (to readers and non-readers).

The Hiss-story of English
The story of the birth and development of English is long and onerous. It has all the characteristics of an epic interwoven into it. England, unlike our colonial memory of it, had been a kingdom which had long survived the onslaught of invading foreigners. The Romans invaded the original Celtic inhabitants of the United Kingdom in BC 55 and the occupation was complete by BC 43 (remember Asterix?). They stayed in Britain for another four centuries till the Germanic settlers like the Angles, Saxons and Jutes followed the Roman withdrawal from AD 430 to 460. More than an invasion, Anglo-Saxons were interested in opportunistic encroachments. After a time-bound lull in which the Angles, Saxons and the Jutes took time to settle down; the Scandinavian pirate invaders, the Vikings (see Hagar, the Horrible), marauded the British Isles to put their stamp there.

By the time they took time to settle down in the Isles, two centuries had elapsed and the Vikings established their language, culture and law in the form of Danelaw by 900 AD. Then it was the time for the Normans from the French Normandy to invade, with William of Orange invading Britain in 1066. Concurrently, there had been cultural, linguistic and social changes that took place along with the historical changes and conquests in Britain.

Language-wise, these encroachments were a boon to the growth and development of English language. The Celtic-Gaelic, mix of language, took on the Roman syntactic garb, during the four centuries of invasion and jurisdiction, and then a new Scandinavian Germanic logic pervaded during the centuries that followed. When the Normans invaded England in 1066, the French baggage followed, which blend into the already existing concoction and for the next three centuries, from 12th to 15th, English evolved taking in the Celtic tradition, the Germanic roots, the Latin syntax, the French declensions, mannerisms, etc, into its dossier.


Among the European languages, English is one of the newcomers in the arena and in that case it carries a strange resemblance to Malayalam, if not in anything else, but in age. English in its modern form, with Geoffrey Chaucer as its father (Ca. 1450) and the evolution of Manipravala Malayalam (which retained the Tamil syntax and the Sanskritic morphology) coincided, leading to the steady evolution to the modern form, from 1425 onwards. Though this is coincidental, at this point of biographical narration, these two different languages with two different roots tell us a lot about the history of languages as well as the history of human beings as such.
The kind of an ardent curiosity in finding out the similarities between different languages began a long time back in the 18th century, when a file of Englishmen, under the patronage of Sir William Jones, began the Royal Asiatick Society in 1824. The main purpose was to help "the investigation of subjects connected with and for the encouragement of science, literature and the arts in relation to Asia”. It was here that Jones and his men found many similarities between Sanskrit and European languages. (for example, the Sanskrit word for birch was ‘bhruja’, the Sanskrit numeral ‘dasa’ was similar to Latin ‘decem’ , then father , mother, brother and many more). This led to the bold assertion from Jones and Co. that there was a common genealogical root for many classic languages like Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Gothic, Persian and Celtic. They believed that the sources must be the same and they called the common family group Proto-Indo European family of languages. Scores of people were drawn into this interesting arena, including Jacob Grim (of the fairytale fame) and they investigated the morphological and syntactic similarities.


Strands of commonality in roots-terms lead them to believe in a hypothetical mother language. These tantalizing and uncanny similarities in basic words of exchange [like the kinship terms, numerals and animals – like eqqus (Latin) cheval (French), Aswa (Sanskrit) for horse and bos (Latin), Kuh (German) and go (Sanskrit) cognate for the English cow- etc] are pointers to the fact that these similarities are not merely coincidental. They, in a way, explain to us the saga of the great Aryan exodus as well.


Indian English
The Minute of Macaulay of 1835 is a document which should fetch mixed squeamish responses to any patriotic Indian, and the document proposed to introduce English to India to create “a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern - a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect". Since, then, though introduced to create a class of clerks and bhadraloks, English came to be officiated as the one of the de facto standard languages which carried a lot of snob values as well. The basic snobbery attached to English can be seen in every walk life

If there were two things that Indians have adapted from its previous colonizers with enthusiasm, they were basically the red tapes of bureaucracy as well as the Roman alphabets of English. It is here that one should ponder over the usage and readership of English in India. From Rushdie , Roy to Adiga, the world of Indians writing in English have been fast expanding to be recognized by the world. At this juncture, the readership is also fast widening. Does this mean that we are being English-literate day by day?

Functionally, any language does not have to necessarily concede to the standard norms of morphology, syntax, or pronunciation as long as the message is conveyed properly. The very many debates in the studying of languages are there and now that the linguists, philologists and others have jointly confirmed to the functionality of language, after all the theories of language origins like the ‘bow –wow’ theory, the ‘ding-dong’ theory or the Eureka theory are all pointers to the prima facie aspect of functionality of language.

Whatever your English is, functionality is the main aim, which can be later ‘tailormadeandseamlesslyintegratedtomatchthesymbioticconglomerationtocatertoblahblahBut if you look at the dynamic nature of this language, you can find that its vocabulary is so expansive that it can accommodate almost everything you want to describe in your life. For example; if you have the fear of peanut butter sticking over the roof of your tongue, it can be called arachibutyrophobia (did you know that??) , or if you want to describe the state of being a woman, that is muliebrity (is this the state of half way between a mule and a celebrity?), and a sudden breaking of thought has also a word in English, that is aposiopesis (which happens in class rooms very frequently); and if you have a sudden urge to peep into windows of houses or class rooms as you pass, it can be worded too as crytoscopophilia. The vocabulary aside, the language is one of the most prolific and versatile one , with its history of borrowing loan words and almost everything from its neighbours, its colonies, and from almost every nation and people it has come to contact with.
Presently, the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use , with its Latin words used in law, French words used in cooking, German words used in academic writing, Japanese words used in martial arts, etc. We, Indians, have had made our own contribution to English language, for example, bungalow, catamaran, culvert, cheroot, chappathis , crore, coolie, dacoit, deodar, dinghy, dungaree, ghee, gymkhana, jodphurs, lakh, loot, paisa, pakora, Raj, samo(o)sa, shampoo, tandoori, tom-tom, wallah, thug, tabula rasa, , etc (an estimate of 30,000 Indian loan words are there in English language , from Malayalam: betel, coir, copra, ginger, teak, etc).

English tells us the tale of a kind of flexibility and openness that led to its growth (Note that this openness is only in vocabulary, the grammar in English had been as rigid and rule bound, with exceptions, as ever). Though the futuristic global predictions of Chinese taking over English still remains a threat, the sheer volume of Chinese language with its highly complicated ideographic symbols and 50,000 characters, stands as a major impediment. The basic unit of Chinese writing is called a radical and there are 122 radicals to be combined in various forms to express various things. For example, two radicals for eye and water make teardrop, two women means quarrel and three women means gossip (which made me decide against learning this language!!)

With such a dynamic language as English our father tongue (if you are a bi lingual, English becomes your father tongue, as the Indian English poet Ramanujan put it), there is hardly any threat that our mother tongues suffer from the sheer existence of English (we need parents, don’t we? I do not understand why people are averse to multilingualism, while studies say that our brains are of capable of being multilingual). This defense is also to touch upon my final point that, given that we possess such a lovely language as part of our colonial heritage, and being professionals shouldn’t deter you from the better usage of language. At the same time, let us also understand that there are no shortcuts to knowledge; be it scientific, linguistic or creative knowledge.

So the next time we communicate well in English, let’s not be complacent, but maybe we should explore into new possibilities of exploring our splendid parentage of our mother tongue as well as our father tongue.

My Trysts with Grammar

Grammar was a night mare for me, be it English grammar or Malayalam, my own native tongue. Maths was another, though I still fear it. It was only when i became a teacher, somehow I surmounted my fears of grammar choking my whole existence out of myself. Somewhere, this method in madness dawned to me as the methods became very tempting and alluring. This blog of mine is an attempt to explore grammar with my friends. part by part I plan to plant seeds of grammatic inquisitiveness into all who read the blog. You can do the exercises I plan to lay out with me and think aloud with me, if you wish to.

I am also a learner here, by hosting this blog, I wish you help me learn as much as I wish to help you