Re: cute words
Bapa Rao (brao@tis.com)
Mon, 23 Feb 1998 01:04:21 -0800 (PST)
Does a user-centered Telugu technical vocabulary make sense?
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I would be very interested in Bhadriraju Krishnamurti garu and other
telusa-ers comments on the following question relating to native
neologisms in Telugu:
Is it possible to capture the process of pure-vernacualar (as given
by Prof. Krishnamurti's examples of the Telugu farmers' speech)
neologism formation and replicate it? For example, in the recent
discussion about Telugu translation of "internet," or "world-wide-web"
we saw a process (P1) which consisted of:
1. identify the underlying linguistic and ontological concepts
of "internet"
2. synthesize these concepts with words from Telugu or related
language (e.g., Sanskrit)
[ The process of importation or near-importation may be considered as an
extreme form of P1. For example, we could (1) declare that, for
all practical purposes, for the target audience, "internet" is an
atomic ontological category in itself, and (2) recognize that English
is a related language of Telugu (in some sense, e.g.,
economic/political/elite-demographic) and do a trivial synthesis by
selecting "interneTTu," "webbu" etc. as the translation. ]
Now, is it possible to visualize an alternate process P2, which, after
it has been applied to a source concept like "internet" or "world-wide web",
resuts in a translation that has the following property:
It is a synthesis ('samaasam') of ontological categories
that reflect the direct experience, on the part of an idealized
(illiterate) Telugu person, of the phenomena of "internet"
and "world-wide-web." Here, I am thinking of a term like
"tIgaTapaa" for telegraph: the early experiencer of
telegraph is able to see the wires, and knows that a
message similar in effect to written letters was conveyed
over them. The details of morse code, the physics of
electrical pulse transmission, etc. would be irrelevant to this
purpose.
[ The process I am imagining for tigaTapaa's emergence is not
exactly the same as the process by which the term
"far-writing" (eliminating the unecessary Latinization) got
coined--farwriting, despite its functional defnition, was
ontological, and due to the inventor, as opposed to tigaTapaa,
which is phenomenological (we see the wires being laid and
experience the Tapaa being delivered) and due to the
experiencer. The disctinction is one of where the focus lies.]
To understand and come up with P2 it would require that the elements
of the experiential interaction between the source concept (e.g.,
"internet") and the idealized Telugu user be identified, from the point
of view of the latter, as opposed to the point of view of the purveyor
of the source concept. Do we know anything about such a P2?
The larger question is, why should we care about P2, which in some
sense is artificial? We could leave things to the natural social
processes, which would probably result in the P1 terms "interneTTu" or
"antarjaalamu." One reason is of course that it is an interesting
train of speculation for me at this moment. Another reason might be
the idea that right now, there is a huge gulf betwen Telugu people and
modern technology, which to me is not satisfactorily explained by
simple "lack of education" or "feudal oppression," though both are no
doubt valid in their own right. (the cotton farmers' situation is an
example of this gulf) The idea that I am considering is that people
will adapt and innovate technology when they feel the confidence
that comes from a sense of ownership of that technology. Naming a
thing establishes a certain authority-cum-kinship relationship to that
thing; the next-best thing to naming the thing oneself is to see
things with names that might have been given by "people like oneself."
Gidugu Ramamurthy argued persuasively that (1) in the modern world,
people like the caakali and mangali need education to survive
economically and (2) bringing education to them would only work if it
is in a language/vocabulary that they actually own. Perhaps it may be
argued that qualitatively there is no distinction between the kind of
education envisaged by Gidugu and understanding of internet, web,
convertible debentures, futures markets, derivatives, exchange rates
etc, since all of these things impact on the modern artisan, but
in a way that leaves him out of the conversations about these things.
It is my thought that, by shifting the focus of naming these things
from their current owners to their now-passive impactees, the process
of a more equitable ownership of these ideas might get seeded in a
practical way, paving the way for bringing
technologically-disenfranchised people "into the loop."
Today there is already a lot of technology, especially in the
mechanical realm, over which this artisan class has significant
degreee of ownership. Perhaps Sri Bhadriraju and others might
enlighten us on how the vocabularies of non-English-speaking machine
operators etc. have developed, and what insights and lessons may be
drawn from them in this regard.
Bapa Rao