The
Organizers of this Seminar have felt, and quite rightly so, that a historical
review of the study of language will serve a useful purpose in a Seminar of this
kind. They have accordingly, not so rightly, entrusted
the task to me.
Now, in the history of human civilization, while we find that
men have wondered aloud about the fascinating magic of language, any kind of a
respectable scholarly study of the subject can be traced directly or indirectly
to one of the following traditions:
(1)
Ancient Classical India and its derivatives, attenuations and
reinterpretations.
(2)
Ancient Greece and its derivatives in Ancient Rome and Medieval
and Renaissance Europe.
(3) Ancient
China and its derivatives in Japan and South-East Asia.
(4) Classical Arab civilization and its derivatives
in South-West Asia and
North –East Africa.
(5) Modern West
and its derivatives in South Asia and elsewhere which again, a can be divided
into two main phases:
a. Comparative
Philology and its derivatives such as Dialectology.
b. Modern
Linguistics in a more narrow sense.
Obviously,
I cannot even hope to cover this wide field. Consistently with my own competence
and the probable interests of the participants of this Seminar, I have limited
my task to the following:
(1)
Presenting in brief an over all framework of linguistic studies:
(2)
Presenting a sketch of the origins and development of modern
linguistics in the West; and finally,
(3)
Presenting a sketch of linguistic studies in South Asia in recent
times.
As
another session of this Seminar is going to be devoted to Historical and Comparative
Linguistics, I have therefore thought it best to leave out a consideration of
the development in this field in the late 18th, 19th, and
early 20th centuries.
I
“ Every science may be said”, says William
Haas (1960: 122-2), “ to have its origin in some radical complexity; in a new
sense of wonder, about something always taken as obvious-a sense of wonder which
asks to be transmitted into a sense of understanding. Amid the sophisticated complications of contemn
of the simple radical problems of the control.”
What, then, is it that distinguishes linguistics from its sister disciplines
which also study languages from their respective vantage points? What separates
the linguistic study of language from what one may call the perilinguistic studies
of language? The difference is simply this – that, while perilinguistic studies
consider language simply as an extremely interesting case within some wider range
of phenomena like human behaviour, social institutions, statistical populations,
formal systems, cultural history, artistic media, or the like, linguistics takes
up the scientific study of language for its own sake—of language as an institutionalized
mode of human communication, as a way of connecting spoken and written signals
and their ultimate meanings. Perhaps I can best present this in a question
and answer form.
Question: How are spoken
and written signals connected with their ultimate meanings?
Answer: Linguistics: The connection is mediated through linguistic
symbols. Linguistic signals of speech
and writing signal but do not signify. Linguistic symbols signify but do not signal. An integrated linguistic act makes use
of both signals and symbols in the context of situation involving a sender
and at least one receiver-his addressee.
Sub-
Question 1:
How does this connection succeed? How
do we succeed in understanding one another’s speech? How do we manage to say and
grasp an endless succession of new sources? What
is that we ‘know’ when we are said to ‘know’ a language well enough to be able
to use it?
Answer 1: Analytic Linguistics: We choose our way through a maze that proceeds
from the more general to the more specific patterns. The patterns constitute a system of rules
that enable us to think of any a one of the whole body of usable texts
as a configuration of the elementary signals and symbols. A Linguistic act turns
a usable text into a used one by matching it with a situation.
Sub-
Question
2: Why do we fail when we do fail to understand
one another’s speech? How does one make
sense of this irrational babel of languages?
Answer
2: Comparative linguistics:
We begin by comparing languages-more specifically, comparing rules, usable
texts, and items. Our aim is to find out either how languages
come to be what they are or whether there is the same old bag of tricks that each
language draws upon.
Sub-
Question2:
1 How does a language – items,
rules, and all –reproduce itself from one
population
of users to another population of users—especially the cultural descendents?
Answer
2:1 Historical Linguistics:
The answer can be sought in three stages.
First, we seek out historical correspondences between items and
rules of one language and those of another. The
correspondences represent either lines of historical descent or lines of
historical cognacy or lines of historical influence that cross the
others. This is rather like the zoologist identifying
animal foreleg, bird wing, and human hand in spite of functional and formal differences
or the culture historian detecting Buddhist or Greek influence in a Hindu custom.
Secondly, we bring out how the descent is characterized by stability, innovation,
and diffusion; how the cognacy yields a language family of divergent members
(the Dravidian family for instance); and how persistent influence yields a language
zone of convergent members (the Himalayan Zone for instance). Finally, we range language families and zones
on the one other hand and link these historically. This reveals a changing network of language
maintenance, language contact, and language displacement. Language seldom die
because the users die out: more commonly they are displaced by competing languages,
or split into divergent descendant languages, or change themselves beyond recognition.
Sub-
Question2:
2 How does a text in one language reproduce
itself in another? How do items and rules match each other across
languages?
Answer2:
2 Correlative Linguistics: We seek out functional correlations between
items and rules from one language and those of another without regard to history.
We can establish translation rules in grammar and vocabulary and trans-rendition
rules in phonology (between English r and i and Chinese i for instance) This will
reveal language universals and language types.
we can even compare lines of descent and lines of in influence. This will reveal universal and typical patterns
of historical change. Correlative linguistics
binds language analyses and language histories into a general theory of language.
While
Western linguistic of the 18th and the 19th centuries was
mainly concerned with Sub-Question 2:1, the linguistics of the 20th
century is mainly concerned with tacking Sub-Question 1 and reconsidering the
other sub- reconsidering the other sub-questions in the light of the answer so
revealed. It is perhaps needless to say
that there need be no conflict of interest between historical linguistics and
analytic linguistics. The two supplement and even complement each other. Correlative
linguistics is only now coming into its own-after a lull that separates today’s
inquires from the abortive speculations about universal grammars, language types,
and progress in language. This is natural, since correlative linguistics can only stand on
the shoulders of the other two.
II
What, then was responsible for the shift of perspective that took place
in the closing years of the 19th century and the opening years of the
20th century? This was the
shift from Hermann Paul’s conception of linguistics as essentially a historical
discipline to the present insistence that linguistic analysis can alone provide
the corner stone of linguistics –sound history presupposes sound analysis. What stands in between is Ferdinand de Saussure.
The Saussure who in his early study of Indo-European vowel coefficients
brought off a signal triumph of the best historical methods of his day was the
same Saussure who went ion to ask the disturbing question-namely what after al
is the basic question that is the unique privilege of linguistics to attempt.
This
is rather like a zoologist drawing a functional and deserved formal analogy between
an elephant trunk and a human have in spite of differences of origin or the student
of culture likening s and witchcraft in a tribal group and law and justice arrangements
in a civil society as form of social control.
But
then one must not exaggerate the break—after all, there is a continuity between
early and late Saussure. Historical linguistics
graduate from its earlier and anecdotal stage, when consonants counted for little
and vowels for nothing in etymology –hunting for isolated words, to the mature
triumphs of over professionalism based on the insight that it is sound systems
that change, not sounds; grammatical systems that change,
not this or that form. It was only a logical step from the systematic
nature of language change to the systematic nature of language itself.
We owe it to Saussure that he took that step and consolidated a number
of stray departures made by different scholars into a whole new perspective.
Saussure
came are a time when the interest had definitely shifted from the prestigious
but dead classical languages to be modern languages and even their folk dialects:
it had also broadened beyond the familiar Indo-European and Semitic languages
to take note the bewilderingly different systems of ‘exotic’ languages like Chinese
or the native unwritten languages of the Americas, Africa, and northern Asia. The Böhtlingk who made the exciting discovery of the Paninian
approach—at once rigorous and flexible—was also the Böhtlingk who applied it with
success to a Siberian language. The phoneticians
with their pronunciation drills, quaint alphabets, and strange contraptions were
already on the scene. Bernard Shaw’s Professor Higgins, alias Sweet the Grammarian
of spoken English, was already inspiring Daniel Jones and others.
The German physicist geographer Franz Boas had migrated to America and
to the ethnography of peoples and their languages language—bringing to the new
discipline the same objectivity, the same refusal to speculate and wander from
the goal that he had imbibed as a natural scientist.
What,
then, were the dominant features of this new perspective on language analysis
and language history? One, there was a clear separation between the analysis of
a given form of speech at a given place and time on the one hand and the tracing
of historical relationships on the other hand.
After all, a speaker speaks in order to bee understood by his neighbors
and contemporaries. And these listeners
certainly do not draw upon any knowledge of the history and the geography of that
language—indeed, they may not have any such knowledge. Al the knowledge that they need of the - regularities
of that form of speech must be sought entirely within that speech.
This is the -principle of immanence demanding the intrinsic study of a
language. Later, this principle took on a rather extreme
form of self-denial. Granting that linguistic
symbols and rules medicate between spoken noises and written shapes and contextual
meanings in a behavioral situation, the idea was to concentrate one’s gaze o the
connection to the exclusion of a consideration of meanings (as with Zellig Harris’s
classic, Methods in structural linguistics) or indeed of both the ‘ substances’
(sounds and meanings) (as with the Danish one-man school, Hjelmslev’s Glossematics).
Two, the principle of recurrent structure and function.
It was seen that there was little point in contemplating single utterances
or single pieces of utterance. Rather,
we must trace how a given piece recurs in varying wholes performing certain function
or functions. And we must compare the
given utterance with others that resemble it in part but also differ from it in
part. These collations reveal recurrent
structures. The whole structures the parts. To take a familiar example, it is
not enough to take delight in detecting, with the phonetician’s trained ear, that
there are two p-sounds in English speech –an aspirated one in the item peach
and an unaspirated one in the item speech. The point rather is to see that
the two sounds function alike –they never compete, but rather complement. One can drive oneself crazy in tracing the
apparently multifarious uses of the English article a or the. The pattern begins to jump to the eyes, as
the French say, when one sees that there is a peach in the fridge matches
there are peaches in the fridge and there is milk in the fridge (in short
there is a zero indefinite article), and that the John we met yesterday
and John match respectively the boy we met yesterday and the
boy (there is a zero definite article too). And so on. Even meaning, that enfant terrible
of human sciences, begins to yield its secrets. Consider the following pairs of paraphrases:
(1)
(a) I require you to read this book.
(b)
I don’t permit you not to read this book.
(2)
(a) I permit you to read this book.
(b)
I don’t require you not to read this book.
(3)
(a) You must read this book.
(b)
You can’t not read this book.
(4)
(a) You must read this book.
(b)
You needn’t not read this book.
(5)
(a) I hope it will rain.
(b)
I don’t fear it won’t rain.
(6)
(a) I fear it will rain.
(b)
I can’t hope it won’t rain.
The new tools is effective at the levels
of phonology, grammar, as well as semantics.
Last but not least, Saussure took out language from the
library and placed it where it belongs –in the social traffic. Language may be a system: it maybe, up to a
point, a self—contained system: but it is also a social institution, a system
that is sustained and realized in social behaviour. It is this third principle of the social matrix of language that
corrects the excesses of the principle of immanence. The recent emphasis on socio-linguistic
studies is simply a reassertion of the social context coupled with an attempt
to detect patterns that govern who says what to whom in what manner under what
circumstances.
This new perspective based on the principles of immanence, of functional
structures, and of social relevance that launched modern linguistics on the formalist
path is actually a part of a larger intellectual movement of the Western World,
even as the historical linguistics of the previous century picked up the evolutionary
modes of thought of the day. In point
of fact (the biologists were inspired by the linguists). Similar ideas turned
up in biology, the study of languages and the study of literary history in a more
or less parallel fashion. Cf. Haas 1956-7.)
The ordered universe of the European Enlightenment culminated in the Kantian
Synthesis. But this seemed to leave out
something- raw-existence under the surface of things. Darwin, Marx, Freud, and the “Golden Bough” anthropologists hammered
away at the edifice—again and again, the tidy civilized routine was sought to
be explained is terms of inner necessities of the biology of the species, of the
production relations, of the biology of the family, of the primitive Psyche.
The turn of the century saw the slow building up of the next movement –a
movement away from reduction, from the desire to get at the thing in itself, from
large generalizations as well as meticulous detail.
It was a movement based on the supposition that, in under standing the
human world, by remaining more modest we can become more ambitious. Relations were seen to be more important than
the entities. Instead of putting all one’s
eggs in one basket—evolution, economic necessity, libido, or whatever—thinkers
preferred to construct tight little systems so that the toppling of one does not
topple the whole lot. What survived from
the nineteenth century sense of history was the sense of the connectedness of
things. “Only connect” said E.M. Forster;
this could very well be the motto of modern linguistics, modern economics, modern
psychology, and so forth.
The subsequent history of linguistics can in a way be seen as a playing
out of these principles. Boas’s work was
carried on by Sapir. Bloomfield linked
up this line of development with the best in the 19th century historical
perspective. Saussure’s immediate disciples unfortunately occupied themselves
more with writing exegesis on Saussure than with language—more importantly, Saussure
influenced Meillet in France, inspired Hjelmslev in Denmark, and the Russians
Trubetzkoy, Jakobson, Shcherba, and Polivanov, the first two of whom moved to
Europe and helped to found the Prague School. Britain came rather late out of
philology and into linguistics. Firth, who led this movement, counted Saussure and Henry Sweet among
his mentors. Sapir and Bloomfield in their
characteristically different styles of thinking nurtured a whole generation of
American structuralists—Harris, Bloch, Hockett Trager, and Pike to name only a
few. Enter Chomsky.
Enter Chomsky and exeunt omnes? Hardly, though that’s the scenario according
to some of his early disciples. But there
is no denying that Chomsky introduced something entirely new, though I must hasten
to add that not all that Chomsky espoused with vigor is all that new. To begin with the continuities, the following
received a fresh emphasis from Chomsky:
(a)
The linguist begins by observing language behaviour-as yielding
a variety of texts. But he cannot stay
there: he has to edit the texts of the rough edges and to extrapolate from them.
After all, language spins out an endless number of texts out of a limited
number of items. What gives an account
of is not the texts but the spinning out.
(b)
What the linguist studies is not language use, not performance,
not even competence, but the content, the ‘what’ of the body of intuitions that
constitute the abstract system.
(c)
While every attempt should be made to seek objective evidence
for the intuitions and to make one’s presentation as explicit and testable as
possible, what ultimately matters is not a discovery procedure but an evaluation
procedure, not a mere fit with the data but explanatory power, not a set of definitions
(for there will always be primitive, undefined terms) but a meta-grammar that
specifies the form that an acceptable grammar must assume.
But that is not all. We must credit Chomsky with some major innovations.
(a)
To begin with, he brought home to the linguists that what one
says is not the only thing that matters, what one refuses to say or what one says
about what one says (for instance, that A peach is in the fridge is less
acceptable than There is a peach in the fridge) is as much a part of the
data that supports the theory and stands explained by it.
(b)
Utterances do not signal all of their underlying structure; accents,
intonations, and breaks give some clues here and there; but grammatical ambiguity
and paraphrase are far more wide spread than linguists
(c)
A sentence may stand structured at amore than one level. “He
wants to go is quite like “ He happens to go” at one level but more like “He wants
himself to go “ or “ He stops going” at another level. “He condescends to go” as a way station between
“ He condescends to for –himself-to-go” and “He condescends to go”.
(d)
Finally, the concern for immanence, for studying a language in
its own terms mustn’t blind us to the fact that, in spite of the large variety
of language surfaces, and transrendition, we find the same sort of categories
nouns, verbs vowels, consonants, and the like useful in describing different languages.
That languages translate each other at all is the more interesting and
important fact for the linguist literary critic.
The search for language universals is once
-again on after a long period of cultivated distrust.
What
is of more doubtful value is Chomsky’s further attempt to ac in terms of a psychology
of innate ideas. What is being offered as an explanation of
the problematic fact suspiciously looks like its restatement. In any case there is no reason why linguists
cannot go about their business without looking over their shoulders to see whether
the psychologists are following them.
III
The exhilarating
and the depressing fact for the South Asian linguist is that many of the concerns
and excitements of modern linguistics have been anticipated in ancient India—Under
vyākaraṇa, šikṣā, nyāya (especially
šābdabodha), and šāhityašāstra Because we, the unworthy descendents,
have shamefully neglected the continued study of this fascinating subject—we either
copy the West or, worse, have kept copying ourselves.
The great divide between ancient and
modern times in this field (as in many others) as of course the coming of scholarly
contact with the West. The first such
contact took the shape of the Western antiquarians seeking the help of a Hindu
pandit or a learning. Muslim Maulavi in exploring the rich treasures of traditional
learning. This remained (and unfortunately still remains) an unequal and therefore
limited encounter. But the antiquarian
bas thus given to language studies in modern India is still with us.
We have to wait for the first university-trained
generation of Indian schools to come up and play their part in the deliberations
of the Asiatic Societies of Bengal and Bombay and receive their training in the
universities of Germany England, and France. Indian antiquary was founded in Bombay
in1872 as “a journal of oriental research in archaeology, epigraphy, ethnology,
geography history, folklore, languages, literature, numismatics, philosophy, religion
&c, “ linguistic studies –or philological studies as they were then called-were
to remain so tucked away in Indology throughout the first period (1877-1919) of
South Asian linguistics, which opens with the inauguration of the Wilson Philological
Lecture Series at the in University of Bombay by the
Indo- Aryanist R. G. Bhandarkar, the Indian co-founder with John Beames, A.F. Rudolf Hoernle, and Bishop Robert Caldwell of the modern study
of South Asian languages. Although there
were Indian Sanskritists in the modern sense before him-Ram Mohan Roy, the father
of modern Indian Enlightenment, for example, if no other-Bhandarkar was the first
Indian to study modern philology. The complexion of linguistic studies was decidedly
historical; the focus was on phonology and morphology; the horizon was exclusively
Indo-European, if not Indo-Iranian, if not Indo-Aryan, if not limited to Sanskrit.
This state of affairs was to continue more or less unchanged in the next period
also; Sukthankar (1941: 598) had good cause to animadvert on his generation which
was “ so slothful-that it never occurs to any one of us to study any language
outside our special, hallowed system of languages.” Hindus would have no interest
ordinarily in Arabic and Persian; Muslims in Sanskrit; North Indians in Dravidian;
non-Parsis in Old and missionaries and European officers; interest in languages
outside South Asia, even in Greek and Latin and Tibetan and Chinese, would be
minimal.
The next period (1919-54), which may
be conveniently dated from the publication of Jules Bloch’s La Formation de
la langue marathe shows improvement in one important respect. The rather wooly, vaguely romantic synthesis represented by F. Max
Müller’s Lectures on the science of language (1862- 66), so pleasing to
the new-found Indian national consciousness in its idolization of Sanskrit, finally
lost its grip. The Junggrammatikers’ revolution finally caught up with South Asian
linguistics. Around 1919, a number of
things happened. The University of Calcutta
founded a chair for comparative philology in 1913; I.J.S. Taraporewala was the
first Indian to be appointed to it (in 1917). In 1921 the University of London awarded a
young Indian, Suniti Kumar Chatterji, a D. Litt. for his work on The Origin and development of the Bengali language
done at the newly founded school of Oriental
Studies. Chatterji held the Calcutta professorship
from 1922 to 1952 and put India on the international map of linguistics.
His thesis proved to be a model for many other Indian linguists to follow. Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute was
founded at Poona in 1917 and was the venue in 1919 of the first Oriental Conference.
P.D. Gune’s Introduction to comparative philology was first published
in 1918 and was to be the staple English reading of generations of young Indian
philologists along with A. C. Wolner’s Introduction to Prakrit (1917),
Otto Jespersen’s Language (1922), Joseph Vendrèys’s Le Language
(1921), English translation 1931) and I.J.S. Taraporewala’s Elements of the
science of language (1931). Jules
Bloch, L.P. Tessitori, R.L. Turner in the West and Chatterji, Siddeshwar Varma,
Baburam Saksena, Dhirendra Varma, L.V. Ramaswamy Aiyar in India represent next
generation in South Asian linguistics. Sir
George Abraham Grierson—representing a fine tradition of administrators turned
scholars—completed his monumental linguistic survey of India (1903-28) in this
period with the assistance of Sten Konow. It began to show its impact—the teeming
non-literary dialects of “cultivated languages” and the “ uncultivated languages”
finally came into their own. The Reverend
T. Grahame Bailey and Chatterji introduced the International Phonetic Alphabet
to the [philologist (respectively in A Panjabi phonetic reader 1914; and in
A Brief sketch of Bengali phonetics 1921).
Finally, we must note that the accentuating of a trend that was already
present in the first period and even earlier.
The rise of modern literatures in the regional languages in the 19th
century, the standardization of a new
prose medium (the ancient literatures being predominantly in verse), the practical needs of the European
officers and the missionaries, the growing
importance of the regional languages in
the school and university systems, and the growth of regional consciousness –all
of these converged to make the need felt for standard grammars and dictionaries.
These were necessarily bilingual at first (grammars in English, the dictionary
glossed in English); later grammars written in the respective languages and still
later uni-lingual dictionaries were produced by Indians for Indians.
The grammars and the dictionaries remained on the whole innocent of linguistics
of any brand till the next period. The
dates of these broadly reflect the uneven time-spread of the British conquest,
of regional cultural developments, and of the weaning away from English. (The dates of the influential text books on
linguistics in the regional language may also be compared with these.
The holding, in 1954, of the first separate meeting of the
Linguistic Society of India (found ed in 1928 at the 5th Indian Oriental
Conference at Lahore) marks the beginning of the contemporary phase in South Asian
linguistics. The coming of independence
to India in 1947 transformed the very complexion of scholarly contact between
Indians and the rest of the world. The relations could grow on a more healthy
footing and could be rid of inhibitions on either side. The Westerner, for example, found a new respect
for South Asian scholarship free from either condescension or well –meaning patronization.
The Indian scholar on his part feels less the need of false patriotic pride
and found it easier to combine self-respect and true scholarly humility. He is also realizing that English is not the
only window on the outside world and that England, Germany, France are not the
only scholarly communities in the world. The
1953 conference of linguists and Indian educationists presided over by Sir Ralph
Turner at Deccan college, Poona expressed the need for an intensive training program
in India for young linguists who could then take up a fresh linguistic survey
of the country based on first-hand field study. The Language Project (1954-59) at Deccan college
made this desideratum a reality thanks to a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation,
New York; since 1960, the Summer Schools of Linguistics have continued under other
auspices. Indian linguistics was finally
ready to catch up with the Saussure—Sapir- Bloomfield revolution in linguistics.
The newly - founded Linguistics Research
Group of Pakistan under the energetic stewardship of Anwar S. Dil held the First
Pakistan Conference of Linguists at Lahore in 1962.
Sri Lanka is feeling the impact of the new linguistics.
The newly-founded Tribhuvan University at Kathmandu, Nepal, has provision
for Indology and linguistics. Though universities
in this area have been accepting dissertations on linguistic subjects for a long
time, Calcutta was still the only South Asian University centre in 1954 offering
a regular course in the subject. There are now over 15 universities that offer
some course in Linguistics. Linguistics
has been put back on the map of Indian scholarship. There is also a new practical motivation for
this study—the so- called language problems of South Asia, especially the need
for expanding, updating, and diversifying language - teaching facilities. The danger of unscholarly motives like regional
or national chauvinism creeping into language studies is very real but is probably
not a serious threat. A welcome feature
of the present situation is that linguistics has started attracting recruits from
field other than language teaching, literature, and cultural history.
In addition, there are research groups interested in language at the science
institutes at Bombay and Bangalore, Kanpur and Pilani
We have along way to go, there is a whole museum of South
Asian languages waiting for us to exploit. we
can begin (to adapt the words of Goethe)
by making our own what we have merely inherited –from our own past as well as from the rest of the
world.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hass, William, 1960. General
linguistics in university studies. Universities Quarterly (1960). 140.65.
Hockett, Charles F. 1965.
Sound change. Language 41.185-205.
Devoted in a large part to a critical historical review of modern linguistics.
Leroy, M.1967. The
Main Trends in Modern Linguistics. Oxford:
Blackwell. (Original in French 1963.)
Pedersen, Holger. 1931. Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth
Century. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard U. P. (Original
in Danish 1924; Paperback ed. entitled : The Discovery of Language.)
Robins, R.H. 1950. Ancient
and Medieval Grammatical Theory in Europe. London: Bell.
Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed)
1966. Portraits of Linguists: A Biographical
Source Book for the History of Western Linguistics 1746-1963. 2v. Bloomington,
Indian: Indian U.P.
Searle, John. 1972.
Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics. The
New York Review of Books 18 : 12. 16-24 (29-vi-1972).
Comment, Lakoff, George, idem (8.II.1973).
Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed) 1966. Current Trends in Linguistics.
13v. The Hague: Mouton.
Includes: Vol. 5 Linguistics in South Asia (1969).
Sukthankar, V.S. 1941. The
Position of linguistics studies in India. Proceedings of the 10th
All India Oriental Conference (1941). pp. 593-609. Delivered 1940. Rptd. Bharathiya vidya
2.23-35 (1942); Sukthankar
memorial edition 2. 386-99 (Bombay: Karnatak, 1945).
Watermann, John T.1963.
Perspectives in Linguistics: An
Account of the Background of Modern Linguistics. Chicago: U.
of Chicago P.
Hass, William. 1956-7.
Of living things. German life and letters 10.62-70, 85-96,
251-7 (Oct, Jan, July). Speaks of Goethe’s
botany, Schlegel’s linguistics history, and Hordovs literary history in the context
of Lamarck and Darwin.
DISCUSSION ON
MODERN LINGUISTICS
A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE FROM A SOUTH ASIAN VIEWPOINT
By
Ashok R. Kelkar
Contributor
1
Mr. Ayodhya
Prasad Pradhan
I have three points I Would like Dr. Kelkar to expand on:
1.
Why should Chinese be called an exotic language?
2.
What is the phenomenon behind the shift from a propositioned
to a postpositional system?
3.
What does Dr. Kelkar have to say about the psychology of language
change?
Speaker’s
Reply
i.
‘Exotic’ is not a word I would use to describe Chinese (as can
be seen from the inverted commas used in my paper). It is simply an expression taken from Western scholars at the time
of their first research on Chinese. Although
these scholars were familiar with Indo European Semitic and languages Chinese
presented features which were totally new in various ways and which therefore
sounded strange and unfamiliar at that time. I was merely showing the widening of horizons
the Western linguists experienced at that point.
ii.
In my paper I have made it clear that historical relation-ships
enable us to group languages in two ways: into language families and language
zones, e.g. the Himalayan zone, or more –widely, the South Asian zone,
Older languages in this zone, such as Sanskrit, has prepositional system
there was option (vikalpa). Unlike such language as Sanskrit, Dravidian
languages are purely postpositional languages and this must have spread to other
languages in the area.
iii.
The psychology of language
is very important but we know. Little
about it, so at this stage our approach has to be very cautious.
We can only say’ Here is an interesting fact ‘or’ There is an interesting
shift’ etc. but there is no ready answer as yet.
Contributor
2
Mr.
Anand Dev Batta
What is the difference between the
dying of a language and a displacement or split?
Speaker’s
Reply
If you look at my paper carefully you
will see I am not making any difference. Languages
seldom die because the speakers die out. There have been cases where whole tribes die
out and this is still a cultural and biological mystery. It is very rare, death of a language in the
literal sense of the term. More commonly languages are displaced by competing
languages. For example, as was mentioned
yesterday, the process of certain tribal
languages disappearing can be seen in Nepal. These languages are disappearing, not because
the tribal are disappearing but because they are shifting from their languages
to Nepali. For instance, when they migrate
from one area in Nepal top another or when they migrate to another country they
tend to adopt Nepali in the first case or another language in the second and forget
their own language. This ‘ language forgetting’
is what I cal language displacement.
The second possibility is that a language
may split into divergent descendents. An
example of this is Latin, which does not survive as such today the though different
changed forms of Latin survive. In France, Spain and Italy Latin changed differently to give rise
to French, Spanish and Italian. As the
French linguist Gaston Paris said ‘ Nous parlons latin’.
The third case is that a language may
change beyond recognition, for example the old English which King Alfred spoke
and English today. The language of the
old texts is hardly recognized as English and scholars for a long time referred
to it as Anglo-Saxon
COLOPHON
This
was presented at an international Seminar on problems and perspectives in Linguistic
Studies at Kathmandu, November 1974, and published in Seminar papers in linguistics,
Institute of Nepal and Asian studies, Tribhuvan Universities Kathmandu, 1976,
p 21-34, discussion, p 35-6.
