Manu Joseph: It is not true that every language has secret feelings

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Manu Joseph 4 min Read May 18, 2025, 02:00 hours are some naive angles writers trying to see too much philosophy in an etymological accident. (Pixabay) Summary should languages ​​be saved on the way out? They may not code really unique emotions, because those who mourn their passing like to argue, but it is tempting to believe in such magic. Usually, if someone speaks a language badly, it is a sign that he speaks another language very well. But many Indians who eat avocados cannot speak language well. This includes English, their current dominant language that made them forget their own. I also lost the ability to speak well, especially an Indian tongue, though I once thought in Tamil and Malayalam. It is difficult to kill an Indian mainstream language because there are so many of us, but our mother tongue has died in us and our children do not know them at all. Still, I can’t mourn a dying language. This is because the broad reasons why people mourn for the downfall of a language, beyond the nostalgia of heritage, are based on false assumptions. Also read: Manu Joseph: How language may have consumed to keep people unfit, there is a view that each language encodes a unique human emotion or a thinking, which cannot be decoded by another language. I want to believe it because I want there to be magic in this world, but according to what I have seen, there is nothing emotionally unique to any language, and the lament about dying languages ​​is too much because we are afraid of death in general. Laura Spinney, whose latest book Proto is: How one ancient language went worldwide, recently told the Indian Express: “A quarter of living languages ​​will die.” It would have brought many of us a familiar pain. The same pain we feel when we hear the sounds of the last person who spoke a language, inevitably a poor bumper in some remote place, or the last songs of an extinct bird, sounds that filled the forests for millions of years that disappeared. The death of a language is not a small matter. Millions of people have been fought and come out in it thousands of years. Then a generation began to abandon it, or he simply became a different kind of people. So modern people try to ‘keep it’. Our age is defined by conservation; Every dying thing must be preserved. But the true heritage of a place consists of the things that intellectuals do not try to save, but which in any case survive-paradisiacal food, mainstream music, the clothes of a bride, even daily wear. What is going is usually the insignia of the old elite, also known as culture, or what the masses can afford to let go. Also read: verbal e-development: Language technologies still form global culture A language always dies of natural causes because it has been abandoned by its people by a more useful language. (People who want South India to adopt Hindi do not seem to be found – for many in this region Hindi is useless.) A powerful reason why people want to preserve a language is the assumption that every language contains a way of thinking or human feelings that are unique to it. This caused some esoteric overreaction. So we are told of an African tribe (it is always an African tribe) that refers to the future as behind it and the past. And we are supposed to marvel at the secret that the tribe knew. But there is nothing left on it. Just as there is nothing about the fact that Hindi has the same word for tomorrow and yesterday. Some naive anglers try to see too much philosophy in an etymological accident. Maybe an incompetent expert made a mistake and it got stuck. There is this famous view that the Inuit people of the Arctic region have hundreds of words for snow because they can see many aspects of it. This is not true. It’s just that the Inuit languages ​​are poly-synthetic, so they can make up long strings, such as ‘light snow’. Also read: Three-language formula: Chhattisgarh presents a case study in her book between us: How cultures create emotions, Dutch psychologist Batja Mesquith mentions words in different languages ​​to build the argument in which emotions are not completely innate, that they are cultural artifacts, recorded and even emerged from local languages. Inevitably, Japanese regularly occurs in Mesquith’s book. She says that the Japanese word Amae, which means “a complete dependence on the nurturant hivery of their caregiver”, has no English equivalent. And that the Samoic word alofa, which includes love, sympathy and pity among other emotions, does not have an English parallel. Mesquita makes too much of such words. That we fully understand the meaning of the strange words she lists indicates that we know the feeling, just that we need many words to express the same feeling. For example, “a complete dependence on the nurturant incorporation of their caregiver.” In fact, the most useless aspect of English is that it has many words that represent extensive feelings, but it is not well known. Ethimologist Susie Dent regularly posts such words on social media platform X – the kind that would be marked red in your word file. Like ‘Beek’, which means to socialize in the pleasant warmth of the sun, and ‘Apple’, which means to sunbathe. Certainly, these words mean nothing unique to the British, especially since they never saw much of the sun in ancient times. Also read: Let the market choose the language on hangout boards that from ‘Jihad’, a word that seems to contain an idea of ​​war. The word simply means ‘struggle’ in Arabic. Everything else about it is a metaphorical application and nothing about the word or its emotion is unique to Arabs. If there is a word that indicates an emotion or a way of thinking that can only achieve speakers of that language, let this writer know. Like I said, I want there to be magic. The author is a journalist, novelist and the creator of the Netflix series, decoupled. Catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Books #India Mint Special