I do know Arudra's efforts at using English words in poetry. But I
believe that he realized quickly that he cannot take it any farther
than sounding funny, nay, a little innovative. Though, I liked some
of his verses like :
Confusion muTTaDi nunDi
Anxiety guppiTi nunci ... mamu brOcEvArevaru lErA ?
"Venu Dasigi" wrote at Oct 27, 95 10:57:38 pm
> However, there are often many good Telugu terms that can be found for
> somewhat common English terms, without necessarily resorting to
> Sanskritized Telugu (or Telugized Sanskrit). I am very impressed when
> I read Telugu dailies and weeklies during my visits to India (and
I echo with some of your feelings that commonly used words (telugu or
sanskrit) should be preffered over the uncommon sanskrit words. Here
is a quick example to support your argument :
In physics, the Telugu word we used for "wavelength" is
"taranga dhairghyamu"(!) which I thought more than half of the students
in our class couldn't pronounce right. But I know a simple word for
the word wavelength as popularized by Cylon(sp?) radio station, which
is "ala varusa" -- many of you may remember the closing words of the
Cylon telugu radio program as "idE alavarusalapai maLLee
kalusukundaamanToo selavu kOrunadi gauri muniratnam..." (By the way,
dhairghyamu is the noun form for the adjective "dheergha", right ?)
One reason that I can think in support of the usage of the Sanskrit words
(as opposed to telugu words) is that by using sanskrit words all the indian
languages can attempt have more or less the same scientific vocabulary,
in a way contributing to the national unity, if not anything else. But,
with my little exposure to Kannada, I did observe that the scientific
vocabulary in Kannada is much different to the vocabulary used by telugu
academy books.
To give a simple example in Social sciences: we telugus use "rAstra"
to refer to the "State", but kannaDigas (and I think rest others too)
use that word to refer to the "Country". This contrast becomes perceptible
when we use the word "rAstrapati" to refer to the president of the
country.
By the way, KannaDigaas (others too) use the word raajya for state,
giving a new meaning for that word in the modern days. Another quick
example of using old word with the new meaning: I have seen Tamilians
using the word Tamil-valai (valai=vala=net) to refer to Tamil-Net which
I thought is a neat idea.
Summarizing my thoughts on this issue, is the addition of foreign words
the only way telugu language is going to grow ? Aren't we to see the old
telugu/sanskrit words acquring new meanings and new connotations ?
To speak my fears out bluntly -- can we say that Telugu never had a
self-standing linguistic identity, and is probably never going to have !!
Regards,
Suresh.