Language developed as a means of communication, rather as a medium of exchange of ideas. But how well does and idea get captured in words? And how precisely is it perceived by the intended recipient? The entire collection of books and scriptures of a civilization are a true representation of the society that created it. To put this in another way, language captures the essence of a culture, just like the stock price captures the essentials of a company. Language becomes a determinant in the development of civilization. Societies with languages that are gender neutral, like Bengali and German, the power is shared more “equally” among the genders than other societies following gender sensitive languages like Hindi or English. To understand these distinctions more clearly, let us analyse this objectively.
A language grows as the civilization progresses. New objects discovered and invented add to the language in terms of new words. Poetry adds a visualization element to the grammar of the language. A beautiful poem is able to evoke the same visualizations and emotions across a large section of the population thereby elevating the level of “human-ness” in the society. Similarly new concepts developed and scientific progress made elevate the society to a higher standard of living. But is the language inherently strong enough so that it can adapt to the changing cultures due to technology and yet maintain the existing identity of the society?
Let us see what we mean by some of our basic words, like “leaf” and “demand”. What do you mean by the word, leaf? In botany, a leaf is an above-ground plant organ specialized for photosynthesis. A stem is elongated structure that supports a plant. So does a cactus have leaves or stems? It is not quite so easy to answer as it appears. Similarly let us try to define the word demand. Frequently understood as a requirement, it has a desire aspect attached to it as well. While the calorie intake required per head may be 2000 calories a day, it does not quantify demand as the demand may be for only 1500 calories or 3000 calories a day depending on lifestyle. The synonyms may help explain meanings, but may end up distorting the meaning as well. Even the basic words are not very cooperative for us to develop higher concepts.
What about the scripts that let us express and share our knowledge? Let us take pictographic scripts for example. They may capture an idea in more complete manner and brief manner, but it faces issues of scale. Scientific advancement will flood the language with new symbols so much that a prowess in language becomes essential for the further progress of technology. Moreover the language is phonetically unclear for everyone and dictionary lookup becomes essential for the intelligentsia. A visualization of a symbol as a picture might undergo changes as the knowledge base expands.
The Chinese (Mandarin) script has over 50,000 symbols of which 10% may be in common use. How much of society and science can be captured in just 5000 symbols? Remember that these symbols are not alphabets but words. To read the names of all elements and compounds in that humanity is aware of, we just need to know 26 alphabets in English. But to do the same in Chinese would require knowledge of not only the symbols for “element” and “compound” but also of each of the 108+ elements. This is a very intuitive understanding of a pictographic language. It is a limited language indeed.
Let us come to the alphabetic languages like English and German. Starting with English, we see that it is predominantly male-focused language. Man represents humans and it is the responsibility of the “white-man” to take civilization forward. The language represents a one-god, no goddess faith system that puts conquest above all rest. Germans on the other hand have a precise language where appointments are fixed in a 24hour time format to avoid confusion. The focus is more on the verb than on gender of the noun. Their nation is their “fatherland” indicating that a sense of pride, power and ambition is central to the collective psyche that coordinates its actions through mathematical “precision” of its language.
There is an Indic set of alphabetic languages represented by Sanskrit, Tamil, Hindi and Bengali. Each of them captures the Indian essence equally but each has specific characteristics that make them unique. Their differentiating is the separation of consonants and vowels. Among the four above, only Bengali is gender-neutral like German. Bengali borrows consonants in its script from Sanskrit and vowels from Tamil. Tamil keeps the essence of South India alive whereas Hindi shows how Arabic language influences on Sanskrit have been “Indianised”. But Sanskrit being the mother language of all, has an elegance and beauty that echoes the fundamental characteristics of nature.
This brings us to the central point of this article. Not only should the language be flexible enough to adapt to progress in science and technology but it should also mirror nature’s characteristics in its fundamental structure. The concept of a two i.e. a pair is a fundamental truth of nature. The pairs may be opposing, like proton and electron, good and bad, or may co-exist like two strands of DNA, male and female. This fundamental truth should be allowed to reflect itself as a separate concept in the grammar. Among all known languages, only Sanskrit adds a dual to singular and plural forms in the language. This is of monumental importance. Between one and many, us and them, there is a form that exists called both or together. From conflict we have a state of equilibrium in between. So the Sanskrit based Hindu civilizations did not expand by military conquest, but by including and bringing together cultures of varying geographies.
It has always been out endeavor to capture the knowledge inherent in nature. We know that nature expresses itself in mathematics. Many scientists are of the opinion that a breakthrough in science awaits a revolution in our understanding of mathematics. Maybe that understanding of mathematics is hindered by “sub-standard” languages that restrain our thoughts from infancy. We can start bringing about the change by incorporating the “dual” of Sanskrit and then proceeding to incorporate words with specific meanings and lesser stress on synonyms. A scientific grammar will help science. And maybe as time progresses, we may or may not have a language that is gender-neutral.
~ 3-Jan-2011
