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For example, many puristic movements
allow `loan translation' of borrowed elements, which means that if a
word can be coined that effectively translates the pieces of the
borrowed word, the concept can be kept. Thus German, which went
through a period of purism (but has now emerged from it) consciously
coined terms like Fernsprecher for `telephone' and
Fernsehen for `television' but in recent years has abandoned attempts
to calque foreign words and now simply borrows, mostly from
English. In Tamil, borrowed words from Sanskrit, Hindi, English and other
languages were (and are) consciously exponged in an attempt to return
to the purity of Old Tamil; when television broadcasting came to South
India, Tamil, too had to find a Tamil word, and resorted to a loan
translation tolaikaaTci (tolai means `distant' and
kaaTci means `show') in lieu of using the English word or
the All-India Sanskritic durdarsan, which is itself a
loan translation from `tele-vision'. But even Old Tamil contains some
loan words (from Sanskrit) but when it was pointed out that the
word aracu `government' was originally from Sanskrit raj,
the solution was to declare quite simply that Sanskrit had borrowed
the word from Tamil, rather than the opposite. Purism may rely on
philology and `scientific' linguistics for arguments it finds useful,
but if the arguments reveal inconsistency and error, they can be
twisted to suit the goals of the puristic movement
(Schiffman 1996:61-63).
Tamil linguistic culture has some metrics by which it can measure puristic
usage, though even these are fraught with some difficulty. But Indian
linguistic culture comes ready-made with various devices, since ancient
`standards' are available against which usage can be compared. For most Indian
languages, Sanskrit and degrees of Sanskritization are ready at hand; for
Tamil, older stages of Tamil are also available, and the exclusivity of these
models (no other language emulates them) adds another notch to the
fervor of Tamil primordialism. One can emulate the grammar, vocabulary, the
syntax of earlier models, and the ability to expatiate at length on any topic
is highly valued. (Here objective measures are ready at hand; a stop watch
can serve nicely to measure the length of utterances.)
But even within Tamil culture (and Indic culture at large) length of
utterance or archaicity of grammar is somewhat mundane; other measures,
more ineffable, less objective, are more highly valued. In fact,
in Indic linguistic culture, the pundits themselves consider servile punditry
of a knee-jerk kind to be lowest on the ranking scale. Those who memorize
the Vedas, e.g., have less prestige than those who commit other texts to
memory, since Vedic is so dense that there can be little comprehension of it,
and gross memorization is all that is necessary. The question really is, who
loves Tamil the most, and how shall we know this?
Next: The use of Metaphor
Up: Who are the Primordialists?
Previous: Purism as language policy.
Harold Schiffman
12/3/1998