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Around the world:
Hijab hits the headlines again
'Turkey cannot have a President whose wife wears a head-scarf,' says
Turkey's leader of the opposition secularist party. For some years now a
gentle tug-o-war has been going on between the government and opposition
to decide which way the country should go; towards the traditional East
or the modern secular West.
The situation is somewhat similar to a problem we have here. Should
we get closer to the West or should we stay back and revive some of our
traditional values. That question came up in 1956 and the country voted,
as you know, for reviving our traditional values.
It is a little over a fifty years since we took that decision, but
the problem sadly is still with us.
Let's turn to Turkey for a moment. The founder of modern Turkey,
strongman Kemal Ataturk, was determined to change the Islamic style of
living. One startling thing he did soon after electing himself President
was to pass a law called the Hat Law.
In other words, hats were to replace the Fez caps worn by men. To
enforce this law he ordered his officials to stand at street corners
with hats in hand. As each man passed by the Fez cap he wore was removed
and a hat put in its place. That was Kemal Pasha's style.
For some reason or other this brave and astute warrior that he was
shrank from doing to the Hijab what he did to the Fez cap. Although a
ban has been imposed on women wearing the head-dress from the beginning
of the Turkish republic it has remained a kind of dead letter all that
time.
For a short while, however, Ataturk was assisted by his wife, the 24
year old, French educated Latife Hanime, whom he married soon after
winning a battle in Izmir. In those early days she helped him with his
international correspondence.
She also encouraged him to carry out the head dress reform by
appearing in public herself without the Hijab and forcing the wives of
the officials to do so. But over the years not all women adopted this
practice and now the wife of today's President appears in public with
the Hijab. There is a move by the present government to lift the ban on
the Hijab
Soon you will be saying not caught but 'catched'
Those who are scared of English grammar may be heartened by the news
from the Harvard University where a team of linguists and mathematicians
have been tracking the evolution of the English language. Soon, they
say, we may be writing 'drived' instead of 'drove.' When I first came
across this phenomenon in Robert Knox, I thought Knox was slipping up
very badly. Here, judge for yourself what Knox was doing...
Knox was reporting how one of his countrymen, was trying to get
closer to a Dutch ambassador who was visiting Kandy, to get some
information. When the King was informed he gave orders to his men to
keep a watch on him.
He, says Knox, not being aware of being spied on "went again, and was
catched." Now this is how generally verbs in the past tense got over
what is called the irregular verb - 'catch' in the present tense and
'catched' in the past.
In future, the linguists and the mathematicians of the Harvard
research team predict, " 'stank' will evolve into 'stinked,' 'drove'
will become 'drived' and 'slew' will turn into 'slayed,'" just like when
we were kids we tried to form sentences in English and, of course, got
pulled up for it.
The experts go on to predict "And if the simplification becomes
really serious 'begun' could change into 'beginned' brought to 'bringed'
and 'fell' to 'fall'."
This then, really speaking, would not be an evolution of the English
language but a strange kind of devolution or going back to the English
speech of the past. And what if we did? For this was the time when, as
David Crystal wrote, the happiest time for the English language, the
time between 1200 and 1500.
"For a glorious 300 years, people could write as they wanted to and
nobody could say they were wrong." Besides, they also could speak in
their regional accents and no one would laugh at their pronunciation for
that. At that time there were no usage fuss-arounds, no language police
to hold up 'No Entry' signs or to book you in for faulting on grammar.
'Navins of the world unite'
This call is going out from an artist in Thailand by the name of
Navin Rawanchaikul to all the Navins in the world. According to a report
appearing in the Herald Tribune, Navin R. appears to have an identity
problem. National identity, he says, "has become an art commodity...I
have a hard time with it because I am sometimes seen as Thai, sometimes
Indian and my wife and daughter are Japanese."
Whatever his personal problems are, he has thrown some interesting
light on the roots of the name Navin. There are apparently Navins of all
kinds spread throughout the world. The reason for this existence he says
is a result of the migrations of languages and the migrations of people.
All this knowledge he and his collaborators have gathered by putting
Google on its tracks, searching telephone directories and word of mouth
referrals.
He has got to know that the Indo-European languages of the West or
the East contain the name Navin meaning 'new' in Sanskrit. Similar
sounding names like Navan, Nevane, Neving and names derived from the
Scottish clan MacNevin and includes even the Korean Nabin.
Discovering his fellow Navins has helped he says to "mend his
lifelong sense of not belonging...So I thought my own name could serve
as a better tool than nationality to understand my place in the world."
And for the other Navins he has a message. "Without the efforts of
the Navin party. without the Navinists as the mainstay of all Navins,
Navins can never achieve independence and liberation."
Roving Eye
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