What's in a name?

Hi all. I noticed a few weeks ago that Blogger has this cool new function that allow users to transliterate in several Indian languages. Transliteration is not the same as translation, but what it means is rather that you can type something phonetically in English script and the Roman characters are substituted with characters from some other language (say Hindi for instance) that have the same sound (or at least as close an approximation as possible). But again, it isn't a translation. For example the name of one of our cats is Chaya which is the Hindi word for shade (actually the proper spelling is probably something more like Chhaaya but that seems like WAY too many double letters for my taste). So transliteration of shade is शेड while transliteration of Chhaaya, the translation of shade, is छाया. Pretty cool, huh?

I am not sure if I have mentioned much before about the Indian languages on this blog so here is a quick primer. The Constitution of India recognises 22 languages, spoken in different parts the country, namely Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Santali, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. Just to give you a bit of context, India only has 28 states (and 7 territories) so that breaks down to just about one language per state (give or take). Hindi is recognized as the official language of the central government but in some states in the south of India (most notably Tamil Nadu) Hindi is not taught in schools and thus a large number of South Indians do not speak Hindi but instead speak the local language. In Karnataka, the state in which Bangalore is situated, most regular folks speak the local language, Kannada and often maybe just a few words of Hindi and probably even more words in English. I feel in the South you are better off knowing English than Hindi if you want to communicate with the locals.

There are a couple of points that resonate with me when considering the effects of having so many languages in a single country. The first is that I am utterly amazed at and in awe of the capacity for language among the Indians. I have yet to meet an Indian who is not at least bilingual. And I mean truly bilingual, perfectly fluent in at least two languages. This consistently makes me feel like a total idiot, I luckily can manage English pretty well and I can put together a bit of Spanish from my four years that I had in high school (but that was between 18-14 years ago, my god, is that right? Yikes!). The truly humbling thing though is that for many, many people here two languages is nothing. A girl in my lab speaks English, Hindi, Tamil, Oriya and Malayalam all fluently and if memory serves she can manage pretty well in several of others (hey Gayatri!). The thing that is truly impressive about this is that these languages are all unrelated with different alphabets and no actual similarity to one another so it is not like learning one helps you to learn any of the others. The second point that I think is worth mentioning in regards to the many languages of India is not so positive and has to do with the inability of people from the same country to communicate with one another. This is something that we, as Americans, take for granted. Certainly there is a population of non-English speakers in the US but it is very small (I can't find any numbers that I trust to support this, everything that I find on the web is from crazies who want to "defend and protect English" as if there is some war on English. Hello dummies, English isn't in danger, it is actually endangering thousands of indigenous languages because like an invasive species it moves into communities and takes over, strangling the native languages, just ask the Native Americans and the Inuits (Eskimos) to name a few). Sorry tangent, couldn't help myself. Give me a break, it's 5 in the morning and I can't sleep so I should be given a bit of latitude I think. Anyway, the point that I was trying to make before I got distracted was that it is almost impossible for me to image not being able to communicate with someone from say, Colorado because we speak different languages. Even worse, since I grew up on the Illinois/Iowa border, would I not be able to understand the Iowegians or have to learn their language in order to communicate with them? Okay, in fairness I do have a hard time communicating with and understanding the Iowegians as it is, after all, they are from IOWA (sorry Mom and the Kreinbrings, couldn't help myself). A friend of mine from work visited the US just about two years ago (hi Neha). She is from the North of India and speaks Hindi and English and has been transplanted here in Bangalore for the past several years while in grad school. She told me the story of her visit to the US and how it struck her that while she was there, maybe for the first time in her life, she could understand ALL of the conversations that were going on around her because they were all in English. She had to leave her country to understand and be understood by everyone. Very strange. Anyway, I thought that I would leave you with a little bit of transliteration in some of the Indian languages so you can at least get a look at the differences. Enjoy!

Hindi
Suzi सूजी
Eric एरिक
Kannada
Suzi ಸೂಜಿ
Eric ಎರಿಕ್
Tamil
Suzi சுசி
Eric ஏறிக்
Malayalam
Suzi സുജി
Eric എറിക്