Like the origin of the humans, there has been much discussion regarding the origins of the world languages, and linguists have tried hard to determine the similarity among various languages. It was first in the 16th century, informed Kenneth Katzner in 1995 in his book The Languages of the World, published by Routledge, that similarity between Sanskrit and Italian were indicated. Since then there have been continuous efforts to decide the ancestry of the languages. Hindi (also Sanskrit) and English have been termed as belonging to Indo-European family of languages. Good to know that India preserves 1652 languages (not to be misunderstood with dialects, they are separate).
You will be wondering what the heck I, a person of literature has to do with linguistics, and why you should waste your time in knowing it. Yes you don’t. But, you know, to share with you what I want to share with you, I needed this introduction. A nice smile :) Here is my statement of thesis- this is what I hear now a days in the Research methodology: two observations (science is nothing without observation, they say!) about language use in Hyderabad.
On the first day of our arrival in Andhra Pradesh (we are seven from three departments of AMU attending this program), we decided to leave our berths on Secunderabad railway station. The station is near to MANUU as compared to the Hyderabad railway station though the university is in Hyderabad. What! Yes it is. It was around 9 o’clock in the night, and I was hungry. I mean I had mice in my tummy. The city was quite charming from its buildings and technological framework, but I was also fascinated by its language, Telugu which is spoken here. The hoardings on the streets were written in some strange letters, of course Telugu, and it was the charm of the letters as some sublime art which had figures in curves, angels, and parallels that I could enjoy the beauty and sublimity of them. It used to happen quick like the blinking light of the firefly. Once my visual sense was entertained, I could know their meanings by reading their translations in English though I suspect that I could get the complete meaning of the language; at least not the music of the language if there was any.
The bus conductor was equally fascinating speaking Hindi and English to us and Telugu to locals. It was this fascination that I and one more friend decided to learn some Telugu words form one passenger in the bus on the very first day. Are you kidding? No we are not. We learnt what are Girl, Thank you, one, two . . . ten, rupee, ticket in Telugu. Thank you is Dhanyavadpallu in Telugu, I learnt. NO, I heard wrong, it is Dhanvadmu. Thank You in Hindi is Dhanyavad. Now it seems interesting to see this similarity between Hindi and Telugu though two languages belong to two different families of languages: Hindi to Indo-European Family and Telugu to Dravidian family of languages.
Another story. On last Wednesday, some of us bunked the lecture in between and decided to go to the library of University of Hyderabad to collect Research material. Library has a lot of quality books. One secret: when you are researcher, good books give you as much happiness as jewels would give to a miser. When I had collected the books which had some relevant material, I gave them for photocopy. When the photocopies were done, the photocopy doer in the shop asked me to give him some one or two naught six rupees to pay. “Interesting, why don’t you say zero, which we say in north India,” I asked and “That’s what we speak,” he replied. Yes it was not the first time in Hyderabad that I had heard zero pronounced naught. The coordinator of the program also used it but at that time, I thought it was because he was educated and had his Ph.D. in English. I used to believe that in most cases, cipher or number 0 is usually zero in Indian and British English, letter O in American, and naught in Australian English.
Culture shock, is it?? Or there is much to learn!!
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