Diluting agent of language

Candy Hunt :

Anuradha MALALASEKARA

Although most of us think that sorry is the hardest word to say, there are many words which keep many people's tongues twisted. Most of those words usually come from different linguistic cultures and happens to mix up with the local language due to the language contact. As two people who are willing to change according to each other's wishes save their relationship while others who remain inflexible fall apart, words which accept changes to their structures survive in a foreign linguistic culture. Others unfortunately face a fadeout.

My memories go back to good old twenty years to the time I first started to get my Japanese lessons at Sasakawa Centre. Sitting enjoying every bit of salty sea breeze and a very foreign language, I started to feel how my mother language Sinhalese and Japanese look similar in many ways. It was almost like exchanging parts from two same jigsaw puzzles that came in two different colours. After the class we, the new students, were keen to talk to our sensei who was much resembled a doll made in Japan, but we were not armed in that much Japanese so we sought the refuge of English.

So here comes the challenge! We felt sad how our teacher struggled in her English. She knew her English but the challenge was to her to pronounce it! We heard words resembled 'buritushikku kaunsiru' (British Council), hotto doggu (you guess what) and majasushikku shiti (Majestic City) during our conversation with her, but it took us sometime time to retrieve most of them.

After many years I realized what she did was a process what we also happened to do over centuries. As a country which can be proud of for been exposed to many linguistic environments, we have earned many foreign words to nurture our lexicon. Since the Buddhism was brought and made contacts with India, we have been presented with many foreign concepts along with names of them. Word 'Karma' became 'karume' and mantra' became 'manthara'. All we have done was we have added some extra vowels to make pronunciation easier.

Same process continued when European invasions happened. English brought the same dilemma as it was full of tongue twisting consonant clusters. Station, school and many more words contain unpronounceable sounds for the Sinhalese. Here comes the solution! Why don't we localize it with some local ingredients? Station became 'istesan' or 'istesama' and school became 'iskole'. Its important to keep in mind that these words are vital in day today Sinhalese speech as nobody says 'dumpriya pola' to railway station.

In Linguistics, there is an area called Epenthesis which discusses the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially to the interior of a word. It has been used to add some flavor into creative performances mostly to generate humor. Writers make their characters speak differently to reflect societal and class differences. A Sinhalese writer can build two different characters just merely changing their speech and this would be the first step to create urban-rural dichotomy!

That means that people who use 'processed' foreign words are different from the ones who use the authentic one. Usually, in our linguistic society, a person who cannot pronounce the word 'station' as it is, is subjected to get discriminated. That reflects another layer of society which emerges out of linguistic capabilities.

I know we all yell against stereotyping on newsprint, but when we become a part of that society we get flushed down by the mainstream.

It is surprising that how a very interesting area of linguistics reveals a dark side of society. Anyway it is hard to remove socially embedded concepts, but at least we can be aware of them, though it is hard to refrain from practicing them!