08-17-2006, 09:22 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Trials, tribulations & triumph of a cultural archeaologist</b>
V SUNDARAM, 16 and 17 August 2006, NewsToday
  Barbara Tuchman, the great American woman historian rightly
observes: Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books
history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and
speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of
civilisation would have been impossible. They are agents of change,
windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are
companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind.
Books are humanity in print.
  These instructive and inspiring words are wholly applicable to
'AN ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF SOUTH ASIAN LANGUAGES' by Dr S
Kalyanaraman and published by Asian Development Bank, Manila,
Philippines. In more senses than one this is a landmark book in the
world of languages, linguistics and culture. This book is a
Multilanguage historical and cultural dictionary of South Asia; it is
a lexicon; it is an encyclopaedia. To quote his own words: This is a
comparative dictionary covering all the languages of South Asia (which
may also be referred to, in a geographical/historical sense as the
Indian sub-continent ). This dictionary seeks to establish a semantic
concordance, across the languages of numeraire facile of the South
Asian sub-continent : from Brahui to Santali to Bengali, from Kashmiri
to Mundarica to Sinhalece, from Marathi to Hindi to Nepali, from
Sindhi or Panjabi or Urdu to Tamil. A semantic structure binds the
languages of South Asia, which may have diverged morphologically or
phonologically as evidenced in the oral tradition of Vedic texts, or
epigraphy, literary works or lexicons of the historical periods. This
dictionary, therefore goes beyond, the commonly held belief of an
Indo-European language and is anchored on proto-South Asian sememes.
http://www.newstodaynet.com/2006sud/06aug-...es/1608sund.jpg
Dr S Kalyanaraman       The great pioneering Indologist Sir William
Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1783, pronounced
with authority the underlying genetic relationship between the
classical languages, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit in his third Annual
Discourse to the Asiatic Society of Bengal on the History and Culture
of the Hindus in February 1786 when he made the following epoch-making
observation: The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a
wonderful structure : more perfect than the Greek, more copious than
the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to
both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in
the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by
accident, so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all
three, without believing them to have sprung from a common source,
which perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not
quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic,
though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with
the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.
  Long before Sir William Jones in 1786, the 16th century
Italian scholar Sassetti apparently studied Sanskrit calling it 'a
pleasant musical language' and uniting Deo with Deva. In the 17th
century, the Dutch protestant missionary, Abraham Rogerius, published
in 1651 the translation of Bhartrihari in Europe for the first time.
So we find many Catholic missionaries of South India, French and
Belgian, studying a little Sanskrit, and mixing with Tamil, producing
the faked Ezour Vedam , the target of Voltaire's criticism; and
Anquitil du Perron, visiting India before Sir William Jones, provoked
the latter's sarcastic criticism of premature handling of Sanskrit
texts. As early as 1725 we find the German missionary (translator of
the Bible into Tamil) Benjamin Schultze emphasising the similarity
between the numerals of Sanskrit, German and Latin.
  Another remarkable Englishman, Horne Tooke, in his 'Diversions
of Purley ' in 1786 anticipated Bopp and other pioneers of Comparative
Grammar. The German traveller, Pallas, worked out the project of the
mathematician-philopher Leibniz (1646 - 1716) and published
'Comparative Vocabularies of all the Languages of the World' in 1787.
This uncritical work was soon superseded by the German
grammarian-philosopher Adelung's Mithridates or General Science of
Languages, published in four volumes between 1806 and 1817.
http://www.newstodaynet.com/2006sud/06aug-...s/1608copy2.jpg
http://www.newstodaynet.com/2006sud/06aug-...s/1608copy3.jpg
  Dr S Kalyanaraman legitimately belongs to this great tradition
of philologists and lexicographers, dictionary-compilers,
etymologists, scholars and savants. He has compiled this unique,
multilingual dictionary of the Dravidian, Arian and Mundarica language
families which he took 18 years to complete. It has been published in
three volumes, running to over 2000 pages with nearly 5 lakh words
from over 25 ancient languages. This work covers over 8000 semantic
clusters which span and bind the South Asian Languages. The basic
finding is that thousands of terms of the Vedas, the Munda languages
(eg.Santali, Mundarica, Sora), the so-called Dravidian languages and
the so-called Indo-Aryan languages have common roots. This dictionary
called Indian Lexicon has also been made available on the internet. He
declares with humility: The author assumes full responsibility for the
semantic and etymological judgements made and the errors that might
have crept in with thousands of database iterations in organizing the
semantic clusters found in the word lists (the lexicon includes over
half-a-million Indian words). The author hopes that with the
impossibility of 'dating' the origin of a word, all its inherent
limitations, the omissions, intentional or otherwise and errors that
will in due course be pointed out by scholars specialized in their
fields, the Indian Lexicon will be a tentative, but bold start of a
skeleton dictionary of the Indian linguistic area ca. 3000 B.C. and
will be expanded further to include modern words.
  Dr S Kalyanaraman was born on 20 October 1939. His mother
tongue is Tamil. But all his school and under graduate education was
in Telugu and Sanskrit in Andhra Pradesh. He is conversant with Tamil,
Telugu, Kannada, Hindi and Sanskrit languages. He graduated from
Annamalai University in Economics and Statistics. He has a Doctorate
in Public Administration from the University of the Philippines and
his thesis Public Administration in Asia, a comparative study of
development administration in six Asian countries: India, Bangladesh,
Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia and Philippines. He joined the Asian
Development bank in 1978. Earlier he was a Member of the Indian
Railway Accounts Service from 1962.
  During the last 11 years, starting from 1995, he has been
working on Sarasvati River Research Project through his Sarasvati
Sindhu Research Centre in Chennai. Ever since his return to India in
1995 and his presentation of a paper in the 10th World Sanskrit
Conference on his research findings, he has devoted himself to
promoting projects for the revival of the Sarasvati River.
  Apart from the massive multilingual dictionary of South Asian
languages, Dr Kalyanaraman has also authored several volumes on
Sarasvati Culture and Civilisation. His other notable work is Indian
Alchemy: Soma in the Veda. He has also contributed to Professor
Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya's multi-volume work on History of Science
and Technology in Ancient India
  To return to Dr Kalyanaraman's Multilingual Etymological
Dictionary of South Asian languages once again. The history of
civilization is more than a tally of our dynasties, governments, wars,
class struggles and cultural movements. Dr Kalyanaraman proves through
this book that it is also the story of how human beings in the South
Asian Region have learned to develop and operate systems of reference
and information retrieval that are external to the brain. According to
current estimates, Homo has been in existence for about 2 million
years, although it may not have become Sapiens till around 100,000
years ago. If this estimate is reliable, then for 99.75% of the
existence of the species Homo and for some 95% of the time that it has
been Sapiens, there were no external systems at all. The brain with
its erratic memory was the only apparatus available for knowing,
referring and recording and that was the natural state of things. The
bulk of our ancestors would have found anything else unimaginable, and
for some aboriginal peoples today, in remote areas, this statement
still holds true.
  This Etymological Dictionary clearly brings out the fact that
language in the region which Dr Kalyanaraman has covered has been the
master tool which man, in his endless adventure after knowledge and
power, has shaped for himself, and which, in its turn, has shaped the
human mind as we see it and know it. It has continuously extended and
conserved the store of knowledge upon which mankind has drawn. It has
furnished the starting point of all our science. In this context the
great words of L.S.Amery come to my mind: 'Language has been the
instrument of social cohesion and of moral law, and through it human
society has developed and found itself. Language, indeed, has been the
soul of mankind'.
  We learn from Dr.Kayanaraman's Himalayan effort that language
is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and
anonymous works of unconscious generations. Language exists to
communicate whatever it can communicate. Language is itself the
collective art of expression, a summary of thousands upon thousands of
individual intuitions. George Steiner in his great work Language and
Silence observed: 'Languages code immemorial reflexes and twists of
feeling, remembrances of action that transcend individual recall,
contours of communal experience as subtly decisive as the contours of
sky and land in which a civilization ripens. Any outsider can master a
language as a rider masters his mount; he rarely becomes as one with
its undefined, subterranean motion'. Eros and Language mesh at every
point. Intercourse and discourse, copula and copulation, are
sub-classes of the dominant fact of communication'.
  As a learned and dedicated etymologist, Dr Kalyanaraman finds
the deadest word in the South Asian Region to have been once a
brilliant picture. We are delighted to learn at his feet that every
language is indeed fossil poetry.
'One goes to the potter for pots, but not to the grammarian for words.
Language is already there among the people'
-Patanjali in Mahabhashya
  In his historic work 'AN ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF SOUTH
ASIAN LANGUAGES', published by Asian Development Bank, Manila,
Philippines, Dr S Kalyanaraman states: 'In philology, as in
archaeology, the search for 'truth' is an extension of a researcher's
imagination. Imagination is not an act of faith, but a statement of
hypothesis based on relational entities in linguistic structures
identified through painstaking lexical work. Two such entities in
linguistic structures are: morpheme and sememe which bind an
etymological group. Sememe may be defined as a phoneme imbued with
'meaning'. Morpheme is defined as a 'meaningful' linguistic unit.
Sememe constitutes the semantic substratum of a morpheme or simply,
'meaning'. What is 'meaning'? It is a concept closely linked to a
social compact for inter-personal communication. The 'private
language' of a speaker's brain (with 'personal' experiences embedded
in neutral networks) is revealed through sounds uttered by the
speaker. Language is formed if these uttered sounds echo the 'private
language' of a listener. Such an echo constitutes meaning or the
semantic sub-structure of a language. Sememes are the basic semantic
structural units of a language which combine to yield morphemes or
words. A sememe can, for example, be distinguished from a phoneme or a
gesture which does not communicate a message in a social compact. Only
those uttered sounds which are heard and accepted in a social compact
can constitute the repertoire of a language. Sememes (or, dhatupada' )
are given a variety of phonemic and morphological forms in the lingua
franca to constitute semantic expressions, or the vocabulary of an
evolving and growing civilization'.
  Ramana Maharishi asked the question: 'Who am I?' Likewise Dr S
Kalyanaraman asks the introspective question: 'What is the
justification for this comparative etymological dictionary of South
Asian languages currently spoken by over a billion people of the
world?' He says that an answer can be given at a number of levels:
  1) The paramount need to bring people closer to ancient
heritage of South Asian language family of which the extant South
Asian languages (Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda language streams )
are but dialectical forms.
  2) There is an imperative international public need to
generate further studies in the disciplines of a) South Asian
archaeology, b) general semantics and comparative linguistics , c)
design of fifth-generation computer systems
  3) There is a need to provide a basis for further studies in
grammatical philosophy and neurosciences on the formation of semantic
patterns or structures in the human brain?? neurosciences related to
the study of linguistic competence which seems to set apart the humans
from other living beings.
  Finally Dr Kalyanaraman declares with magisterial clarity:
'The urgent warrant for my etymological dictionary is the difficulty
faced by scholars in collating different lexicons and in obtaining
works such as CDIAL (A Comparative Dictionary of Indo-Aryan Languages)
even in eminent libraries. In tracing the etyma (literally meaning
truth in Greek) of the South Asian languages, it is adequate to
indicate the word forms which can be traced into the mists of
history'.
  Dr Kalyanaraman's Dictionary deals with more than 8000
semantic clusters relating to the South Asian Languages. Overarching
this vast region??in geographical, linguistic and cultural
terms??there is an areal 'South Asian Language Type'. Dr.Kalyanaraman
seeks to prove this fact by establishing a semantic concordance among
the so called Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda languages. This area
covers a geographical region bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south
and the mountain ranges which insulate it from other regions of the
Asian Continent on the north, east and west.
  The semantic clustering attempted by Dr.Kalyanaraman in this
Dictionary rests on the following hypothesis:
  1 It is possible to reconstruct a proto-South Asian idiom or
lingua franca of circa the centuries traversed by the Indus Valley
Civilization (C.2500 to 1700 BC)
  2 South Asia is a linguistic area nursed in the cradle of the
Indus Valley Civilization.
  Operating within this framework, Dr Kalyanaraman summarily
rejects the two long standing and earlier assertions:
  a) Sir William Jones's assertion in 1786 of an Indo-European
Linguistic Family
  b) F W Ellis's assertion in 1816 of a southern family of languages.
  This cleavage was mischievously created by the Colonial
British Rulers as a part of their strategy of Divide and Rule. Dr
Kalyanaraman also dismisses the exclusion of the so-called
Austro-Asiatic or Munda (or Kherwari) languages. His thesis is that
there was a proto-South Asian Linguistic area (C 2500 BC) which
included these three language groups. His underlying assumption is
that the so-called Dravidian, Munda and Aryan Languages can be traced
to an ancient South Asian Family by establishing the unifying elements
in semantic terms. This is in keeping with the views of G.U.Pope in
another context: ..that between the languages of Southern India and
those of the Aryan family there are many deeply seated and radical
affinities; that the differences between the Dravidian tongues and the
Aryan are not as great as that between the Celtic for instance and the
Sanskrit. It is in this spirit that Dr Kalyanaraman has dedicated this
great dictionary to Panini and Tolkappiyan.
  Reading this fascinating book, we understand that each
language is only in part an individual instrument. It is in the main,
a community instrument used for community purposes. As such each
language tends to launch out on a career of its own, to which
individuals contribute very much as the coral insect contributes to
the growth of a coral reef or island. The essence of language lies in
the intentional conveyance of ideas from one living being to another
through the instrumentality of arbitrary tokens or symbols agreed upon
and understood by both as being associated with the particular ideas
in question. In short language in this world is for keeping things
safe in their places. Martin Heidegger rightly says that language is
the house of being.
  Words are but the signs and counters of knowledge, and their
currency should be strictly regulated by the capital which they
represent. The finest words in the world are only vain sounds, if you
cannot comprehend. Words, when written, crystallize history; their
very structure gives permanence to the unchangeable past. Francis
Bacon said; 'men suppose their reason has command over their words;
still it happens that words in return exercise authority on reason'.
Words may be either servants or masters. If they are servants, they
may safely guide us in the way of truth. If they become our masters,
they intoxicate the brain and lead into swamps of confused thoughts
where there is no solid footing.
  Language is the amber in which thousands of precious thoughts
have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested thousands of
lightening-flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested,
might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing
and perishing as the lightning. Samuel Taylor Coleridge rightly
observes: 'Language is the armoury of the human mind; and at once
contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future
conquests'.
  We can infer the spirit of a nation in great measure from the
language, which is a sort of monument to which each forcible
individual in a course of many hundred years of social history has
contributed a stone. And, universally, a good example of this social
force is the veracity of language, which cannot be debauched. In this
context Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly sums up: 'In any controversy
concerning morals, an appeal may be made with safety to the sentiments
which the language of the people expresses. Proverbs, words and
grammar-inflections convey the public sense with more purity and
precision than the wisest individual'.
  Language contains so faithful a record of the good and of the
evil which in time past have been working in the minds and hearts of
men, we shall not err, if we regard it as a moral barometer indicating
and permanently marking the rise or fall of a nation's life. No wonder
Noah Webster in his Preface to the great AMERICAN DICTIONARY OF THE
ENGLIGH LANGUAGE wrote in 1828: 'Language is the expression of ideas;
and if the people of our country cannot preserve an identity of ideas,
they cannot retain an identity of language'.
  Viewed in this light language is the most valuable single
possession of the human race. Man does not live on bread alone: his
other indispensable necessity is communication. We shall never
approach a complete understanding of the nature of language, so long
as we confine our attention to its intellectual function as a means of
communicating thought. Language is a form of human reason, which has
its reasons which are unknown to man. The mastery over reality, both
technical and social, grows side by side with the knowledge of how to
use a language?more particularly words. A word is not a crystal,
transparent and unchanging. In all senses it is the skin of living
thought.
  I enjoyed reading this Dictionary by Dr Kalyanaraman. I would
pay my tribute to his work in the words of W H Auden: 'Though a work
of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite
and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are
obviously 'truer' than others, some doubtful, some obviously false and
some absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good
dictionary, rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable,
for, in relation to its reader, a dictionary is absolutely passive and
may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.'
http://www.newstodaynet.com/2006sud/06aug/1608ss1.htm
http://newstodaynet.com/2006sud/06aug/1708ss1.htm<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
V SUNDARAM, 16 and 17 August 2006, NewsToday
  Barbara Tuchman, the great American woman historian rightly
observes: Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books
history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and
speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of
civilisation would have been impossible. They are agents of change,
windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are
companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind.
Books are humanity in print.
  These instructive and inspiring words are wholly applicable to
'AN ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF SOUTH ASIAN LANGUAGES' by Dr S
Kalyanaraman and published by Asian Development Bank, Manila,
Philippines. In more senses than one this is a landmark book in the
world of languages, linguistics and culture. This book is a
Multilanguage historical and cultural dictionary of South Asia; it is
a lexicon; it is an encyclopaedia. To quote his own words: This is a
comparative dictionary covering all the languages of South Asia (which
may also be referred to, in a geographical/historical sense as the
Indian sub-continent ). This dictionary seeks to establish a semantic
concordance, across the languages of numeraire facile of the South
Asian sub-continent : from Brahui to Santali to Bengali, from Kashmiri
to Mundarica to Sinhalece, from Marathi to Hindi to Nepali, from
Sindhi or Panjabi or Urdu to Tamil. A semantic structure binds the
languages of South Asia, which may have diverged morphologically or
phonologically as evidenced in the oral tradition of Vedic texts, or
epigraphy, literary works or lexicons of the historical periods. This
dictionary, therefore goes beyond, the commonly held belief of an
Indo-European language and is anchored on proto-South Asian sememes.
http://www.newstodaynet.com/2006sud/06aug-...es/1608sund.jpg
Dr S Kalyanaraman       The great pioneering Indologist Sir William
Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1783, pronounced
with authority the underlying genetic relationship between the
classical languages, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit in his third Annual
Discourse to the Asiatic Society of Bengal on the History and Culture
of the Hindus in February 1786 when he made the following epoch-making
observation: The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a
wonderful structure : more perfect than the Greek, more copious than
the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to
both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in
the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by
accident, so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all
three, without believing them to have sprung from a common source,
which perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not
quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic,
though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with
the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.
  Long before Sir William Jones in 1786, the 16th century
Italian scholar Sassetti apparently studied Sanskrit calling it 'a
pleasant musical language' and uniting Deo with Deva. In the 17th
century, the Dutch protestant missionary, Abraham Rogerius, published
in 1651 the translation of Bhartrihari in Europe for the first time.
So we find many Catholic missionaries of South India, French and
Belgian, studying a little Sanskrit, and mixing with Tamil, producing
the faked Ezour Vedam , the target of Voltaire's criticism; and
Anquitil du Perron, visiting India before Sir William Jones, provoked
the latter's sarcastic criticism of premature handling of Sanskrit
texts. As early as 1725 we find the German missionary (translator of
the Bible into Tamil) Benjamin Schultze emphasising the similarity
between the numerals of Sanskrit, German and Latin.
  Another remarkable Englishman, Horne Tooke, in his 'Diversions
of Purley ' in 1786 anticipated Bopp and other pioneers of Comparative
Grammar. The German traveller, Pallas, worked out the project of the
mathematician-philopher Leibniz (1646 - 1716) and published
'Comparative Vocabularies of all the Languages of the World' in 1787.
This uncritical work was soon superseded by the German
grammarian-philosopher Adelung's Mithridates or General Science of
Languages, published in four volumes between 1806 and 1817.
http://www.newstodaynet.com/2006sud/06aug-...s/1608copy2.jpg
http://www.newstodaynet.com/2006sud/06aug-...s/1608copy3.jpg
  Dr S Kalyanaraman legitimately belongs to this great tradition
of philologists and lexicographers, dictionary-compilers,
etymologists, scholars and savants. He has compiled this unique,
multilingual dictionary of the Dravidian, Arian and Mundarica language
families which he took 18 years to complete. It has been published in
three volumes, running to over 2000 pages with nearly 5 lakh words
from over 25 ancient languages. This work covers over 8000 semantic
clusters which span and bind the South Asian Languages. The basic
finding is that thousands of terms of the Vedas, the Munda languages
(eg.Santali, Mundarica, Sora), the so-called Dravidian languages and
the so-called Indo-Aryan languages have common roots. This dictionary
called Indian Lexicon has also been made available on the internet. He
declares with humility: The author assumes full responsibility for the
semantic and etymological judgements made and the errors that might
have crept in with thousands of database iterations in organizing the
semantic clusters found in the word lists (the lexicon includes over
half-a-million Indian words). The author hopes that with the
impossibility of 'dating' the origin of a word, all its inherent
limitations, the omissions, intentional or otherwise and errors that
will in due course be pointed out by scholars specialized in their
fields, the Indian Lexicon will be a tentative, but bold start of a
skeleton dictionary of the Indian linguistic area ca. 3000 B.C. and
will be expanded further to include modern words.
  Dr S Kalyanaraman was born on 20 October 1939. His mother
tongue is Tamil. But all his school and under graduate education was
in Telugu and Sanskrit in Andhra Pradesh. He is conversant with Tamil,
Telugu, Kannada, Hindi and Sanskrit languages. He graduated from
Annamalai University in Economics and Statistics. He has a Doctorate
in Public Administration from the University of the Philippines and
his thesis Public Administration in Asia, a comparative study of
development administration in six Asian countries: India, Bangladesh,
Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia and Philippines. He joined the Asian
Development bank in 1978. Earlier he was a Member of the Indian
Railway Accounts Service from 1962.
  During the last 11 years, starting from 1995, he has been
working on Sarasvati River Research Project through his Sarasvati
Sindhu Research Centre in Chennai. Ever since his return to India in
1995 and his presentation of a paper in the 10th World Sanskrit
Conference on his research findings, he has devoted himself to
promoting projects for the revival of the Sarasvati River.
  Apart from the massive multilingual dictionary of South Asian
languages, Dr Kalyanaraman has also authored several volumes on
Sarasvati Culture and Civilisation. His other notable work is Indian
Alchemy: Soma in the Veda. He has also contributed to Professor
Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya's multi-volume work on History of Science
and Technology in Ancient India
  To return to Dr Kalyanaraman's Multilingual Etymological
Dictionary of South Asian languages once again. The history of
civilization is more than a tally of our dynasties, governments, wars,
class struggles and cultural movements. Dr Kalyanaraman proves through
this book that it is also the story of how human beings in the South
Asian Region have learned to develop and operate systems of reference
and information retrieval that are external to the brain. According to
current estimates, Homo has been in existence for about 2 million
years, although it may not have become Sapiens till around 100,000
years ago. If this estimate is reliable, then for 99.75% of the
existence of the species Homo and for some 95% of the time that it has
been Sapiens, there were no external systems at all. The brain with
its erratic memory was the only apparatus available for knowing,
referring and recording and that was the natural state of things. The
bulk of our ancestors would have found anything else unimaginable, and
for some aboriginal peoples today, in remote areas, this statement
still holds true.
  This Etymological Dictionary clearly brings out the fact that
language in the region which Dr Kalyanaraman has covered has been the
master tool which man, in his endless adventure after knowledge and
power, has shaped for himself, and which, in its turn, has shaped the
human mind as we see it and know it. It has continuously extended and
conserved the store of knowledge upon which mankind has drawn. It has
furnished the starting point of all our science. In this context the
great words of L.S.Amery come to my mind: 'Language has been the
instrument of social cohesion and of moral law, and through it human
society has developed and found itself. Language, indeed, has been the
soul of mankind'.
  We learn from Dr.Kayanaraman's Himalayan effort that language
is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and
anonymous works of unconscious generations. Language exists to
communicate whatever it can communicate. Language is itself the
collective art of expression, a summary of thousands upon thousands of
individual intuitions. George Steiner in his great work Language and
Silence observed: 'Languages code immemorial reflexes and twists of
feeling, remembrances of action that transcend individual recall,
contours of communal experience as subtly decisive as the contours of
sky and land in which a civilization ripens. Any outsider can master a
language as a rider masters his mount; he rarely becomes as one with
its undefined, subterranean motion'. Eros and Language mesh at every
point. Intercourse and discourse, copula and copulation, are
sub-classes of the dominant fact of communication'.
  As a learned and dedicated etymologist, Dr Kalyanaraman finds
the deadest word in the South Asian Region to have been once a
brilliant picture. We are delighted to learn at his feet that every
language is indeed fossil poetry.
'One goes to the potter for pots, but not to the grammarian for words.
Language is already there among the people'
-Patanjali in Mahabhashya
  In his historic work 'AN ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF SOUTH
ASIAN LANGUAGES', published by Asian Development Bank, Manila,
Philippines, Dr S Kalyanaraman states: 'In philology, as in
archaeology, the search for 'truth' is an extension of a researcher's
imagination. Imagination is not an act of faith, but a statement of
hypothesis based on relational entities in linguistic structures
identified through painstaking lexical work. Two such entities in
linguistic structures are: morpheme and sememe which bind an
etymological group. Sememe may be defined as a phoneme imbued with
'meaning'. Morpheme is defined as a 'meaningful' linguistic unit.
Sememe constitutes the semantic substratum of a morpheme or simply,
'meaning'. What is 'meaning'? It is a concept closely linked to a
social compact for inter-personal communication. The 'private
language' of a speaker's brain (with 'personal' experiences embedded
in neutral networks) is revealed through sounds uttered by the
speaker. Language is formed if these uttered sounds echo the 'private
language' of a listener. Such an echo constitutes meaning or the
semantic sub-structure of a language. Sememes are the basic semantic
structural units of a language which combine to yield morphemes or
words. A sememe can, for example, be distinguished from a phoneme or a
gesture which does not communicate a message in a social compact. Only
those uttered sounds which are heard and accepted in a social compact
can constitute the repertoire of a language. Sememes (or, dhatupada' )
are given a variety of phonemic and morphological forms in the lingua
franca to constitute semantic expressions, or the vocabulary of an
evolving and growing civilization'.
  Ramana Maharishi asked the question: 'Who am I?' Likewise Dr S
Kalyanaraman asks the introspective question: 'What is the
justification for this comparative etymological dictionary of South
Asian languages currently spoken by over a billion people of the
world?' He says that an answer can be given at a number of levels:
  1) The paramount need to bring people closer to ancient
heritage of South Asian language family of which the extant South
Asian languages (Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda language streams )
are but dialectical forms.
  2) There is an imperative international public need to
generate further studies in the disciplines of a) South Asian
archaeology, b) general semantics and comparative linguistics , c)
design of fifth-generation computer systems
  3) There is a need to provide a basis for further studies in
grammatical philosophy and neurosciences on the formation of semantic
patterns or structures in the human brain?? neurosciences related to
the study of linguistic competence which seems to set apart the humans
from other living beings.
  Finally Dr Kalyanaraman declares with magisterial clarity:
'The urgent warrant for my etymological dictionary is the difficulty
faced by scholars in collating different lexicons and in obtaining
works such as CDIAL (A Comparative Dictionary of Indo-Aryan Languages)
even in eminent libraries. In tracing the etyma (literally meaning
truth in Greek) of the South Asian languages, it is adequate to
indicate the word forms which can be traced into the mists of
history'.
  Dr Kalyanaraman's Dictionary deals with more than 8000
semantic clusters relating to the South Asian Languages. Overarching
this vast region??in geographical, linguistic and cultural
terms??there is an areal 'South Asian Language Type'. Dr.Kalyanaraman
seeks to prove this fact by establishing a semantic concordance among
the so called Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda languages. This area
covers a geographical region bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south
and the mountain ranges which insulate it from other regions of the
Asian Continent on the north, east and west.
  The semantic clustering attempted by Dr.Kalyanaraman in this
Dictionary rests on the following hypothesis:
  1 It is possible to reconstruct a proto-South Asian idiom or
lingua franca of circa the centuries traversed by the Indus Valley
Civilization (C.2500 to 1700 BC)
  2 South Asia is a linguistic area nursed in the cradle of the
Indus Valley Civilization.
  Operating within this framework, Dr Kalyanaraman summarily
rejects the two long standing and earlier assertions:
  a) Sir William Jones's assertion in 1786 of an Indo-European
Linguistic Family
  b) F W Ellis's assertion in 1816 of a southern family of languages.
  This cleavage was mischievously created by the Colonial
British Rulers as a part of their strategy of Divide and Rule. Dr
Kalyanaraman also dismisses the exclusion of the so-called
Austro-Asiatic or Munda (or Kherwari) languages. His thesis is that
there was a proto-South Asian Linguistic area (C 2500 BC) which
included these three language groups. His underlying assumption is
that the so-called Dravidian, Munda and Aryan Languages can be traced
to an ancient South Asian Family by establishing the unifying elements
in semantic terms. This is in keeping with the views of G.U.Pope in
another context: ..that between the languages of Southern India and
those of the Aryan family there are many deeply seated and radical
affinities; that the differences between the Dravidian tongues and the
Aryan are not as great as that between the Celtic for instance and the
Sanskrit. It is in this spirit that Dr Kalyanaraman has dedicated this
great dictionary to Panini and Tolkappiyan.
  Reading this fascinating book, we understand that each
language is only in part an individual instrument. It is in the main,
a community instrument used for community purposes. As such each
language tends to launch out on a career of its own, to which
individuals contribute very much as the coral insect contributes to
the growth of a coral reef or island. The essence of language lies in
the intentional conveyance of ideas from one living being to another
through the instrumentality of arbitrary tokens or symbols agreed upon
and understood by both as being associated with the particular ideas
in question. In short language in this world is for keeping things
safe in their places. Martin Heidegger rightly says that language is
the house of being.
  Words are but the signs and counters of knowledge, and their
currency should be strictly regulated by the capital which they
represent. The finest words in the world are only vain sounds, if you
cannot comprehend. Words, when written, crystallize history; their
very structure gives permanence to the unchangeable past. Francis
Bacon said; 'men suppose their reason has command over their words;
still it happens that words in return exercise authority on reason'.
Words may be either servants or masters. If they are servants, they
may safely guide us in the way of truth. If they become our masters,
they intoxicate the brain and lead into swamps of confused thoughts
where there is no solid footing.
  Language is the amber in which thousands of precious thoughts
have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested thousands of
lightening-flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested,
might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing
and perishing as the lightning. Samuel Taylor Coleridge rightly
observes: 'Language is the armoury of the human mind; and at once
contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future
conquests'.
  We can infer the spirit of a nation in great measure from the
language, which is a sort of monument to which each forcible
individual in a course of many hundred years of social history has
contributed a stone. And, universally, a good example of this social
force is the veracity of language, which cannot be debauched. In this
context Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly sums up: 'In any controversy
concerning morals, an appeal may be made with safety to the sentiments
which the language of the people expresses. Proverbs, words and
grammar-inflections convey the public sense with more purity and
precision than the wisest individual'.
  Language contains so faithful a record of the good and of the
evil which in time past have been working in the minds and hearts of
men, we shall not err, if we regard it as a moral barometer indicating
and permanently marking the rise or fall of a nation's life. No wonder
Noah Webster in his Preface to the great AMERICAN DICTIONARY OF THE
ENGLIGH LANGUAGE wrote in 1828: 'Language is the expression of ideas;
and if the people of our country cannot preserve an identity of ideas,
they cannot retain an identity of language'.
  Viewed in this light language is the most valuable single
possession of the human race. Man does not live on bread alone: his
other indispensable necessity is communication. We shall never
approach a complete understanding of the nature of language, so long
as we confine our attention to its intellectual function as a means of
communicating thought. Language is a form of human reason, which has
its reasons which are unknown to man. The mastery over reality, both
technical and social, grows side by side with the knowledge of how to
use a language?more particularly words. A word is not a crystal,
transparent and unchanging. In all senses it is the skin of living
thought.
  I enjoyed reading this Dictionary by Dr Kalyanaraman. I would
pay my tribute to his work in the words of W H Auden: 'Though a work
of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite
and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are
obviously 'truer' than others, some doubtful, some obviously false and
some absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good
dictionary, rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable,
for, in relation to its reader, a dictionary is absolutely passive and
may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.'
http://www.newstodaynet.com/2006sud/06aug/1608ss1.htm
http://newstodaynet.com/2006sud/06aug/1708ss1.htm<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->