Language is just a medium of communication, unless it's your mother tongue

Disclaimer: Nope. Can’t think of anything. If you are offended by this blog, read the title again and repeat the following step with a smile. Sing in Tamil, tour in France, try German (I mean the language), watch Desi movies and read Shakespeare.

This is the story of how I learnt other languages apart from my mother tongue Tamil.

As you know, there are two la, ra and na in Tamil. When I was five, during the language test, the teacher asked me to spell some words.

She asked, “Which ‘ra’ do you use in in ‘maram’? The small one or the big one?” (Maram: tree)

I was delighted. No one asked a five year old to choose. I promptly answered, “I choose the big one.”

She frowned and said, “You don’t get to choose.” I should have figured.

She asked her next question, “Which one in ‘naai’?” (Naai: Dog)

I pouted, “I don’t get to choose a dog here, do I?”

She sighed, shook her head and moved on to the next kid in the class. Needless to say I didn’t score a hundred in the subject. She gave me a 97. I didn’t even know how to count to 97 at the time. I went home and told my mother that I wanted to study an easier language. She was more excited than empathising, “We will switch you to Hindi. It will come in handy if you go outside of Tamil Nadu.” I was five, the only outside I knew was the school play ground but the idea of learning a different language sounded good. My father was not very welcoming of this but I was put in Hindi class in the next grade anyway.

I sat in the first row, all excited and enthusiastic to learn something easy and excel in it for the rest of my life. Then the teacher asked us which ‘ka’ we use in ‘khaana’. I beamed with pride, “The one and only.” Turns out there were four variants of almost every letter in Hindi! I expected one, struggled with two and somehow ended up with four! Kind of like how people used to end up with kids in olden times.

So, again I told my parents that this wasn’t working out and I hated the language. My mom was offended as though I said I hated Tamil. My dad happily suggested that I went back to Tamil. “Or make Sanskrit your second language.” “But she already learns Sanskrit as a third language so that’s out of question. Also, we can teach her Tamil at home. English and Hindi are better choices here”, added my mother. (Oh yeah, the home tutoring went really well. In fact if you look keenly, this blog is actually written in Tamil.)

“Sure. Let’s suck up to the white people. We will learn Sanskrit when the Germans claim it to be their language and give it back to us. Yoga and feminism are western ideology already”, my father grumbled. This is a man who knows Hindi and Sanskrit, works in North India and still converses in Tamil to the north Indians. Tamil couldn’t have asked for a better language zealot.

Anyway, that’s how I learnt Hindi. Not that the second language or the government exams helped me any better in communication skills. No. That came much later when Shah Rukh Khan used more English dialogues and translated them in Hindi in all his movies. Thanks to King Khan, I can now piss off Hindi people fluently.

This language baggage carried on for years until I finally switched to French (Ya, I know!) and four years of my crucial school life sailed away smoothly. The pronunciation and spelling in the language felt strange. Not every letter had a job in the word there but they were there anyway. Like immigrants in America. But it was indeed an easy language to learn so I didn’t really read too much into the queer aspects of it. It wasn’t my mother tongue so I didn’t care much.

Speaking of German (two paragraphs back), I took German classes too. Yeah. Talk about baggage, this is a big one. The top universities in India are for the best of the best and considering the competition here, even the best would go down the ladder a little so I wanted to do higher studies abroad just like anyone else. And German Universities were best suited for my course. Hence the German class. I didn’t learn to master the language. I just wanted to learn another language that’s all. But honestly after learning so many languages in school and surrounded by Telugu people at work I picked up way too many languages and my brain was short circuited at that point. So whenever I came across a new word or whenever the German teacher said something in German that I didn’t understand, my over loaded brain started playing a skit in its own space. You know, just to remember the words easily and place it in the right cell and not mix it with the French or the Hindi cell in my brain. Anyway by this point in my life I had already forgotten all my French so I had some cells to spare. I shared this technique with my German classmates for altruistic reasons only.

Four German men are in a room with their boss. Imagine them in robes and wigs and whatever it is that makes you travel back in time. They are discussing about developing a new language for their country, Germany. (Time periods are most definitely messed up because I am bad at history).

“France, Spain, Italy and other European countries have their unique language my Lord. We have to come up with something”, said guy no.1.

“Then get me a new language in an hour. And I don’t want any errors”, the big boss ordered. I guess team leads and bosses have been unreasonable back in those days too, whenever this happened.

“Are we really doing this? Can’t we just speak in English?” pleaded guy no.2.

“Doi, we are not Indians”, said Phoebe. I have no idea why she is in this room.

“Sshhh. Women aren’t given rights to opine in front of men yet”, scholar no. 2 said with a stern voice.

“Doisshh! That will be our language. And we will call our country, Doisshland”, beamed guy no.3.

“Let’s mix up the spelling a little. The French are doing it. It will look like a really difficult language then. Deutsch. That will do it”, suggested guy no.4.

“Aarrrggh! Excuse me. I am not feeling too well. I am coming down with cold”, scholar no.1 complained.

“Boo hoo. Bite me. We are working here”, scholar no.2 retorted.

“Arbite. That means work”, decided scholar no.3.

“Throw in an ‘e’ there and let’s pronounce our ‘e’ at the end of a word. After all, they are our letters. Arbeite means to work,” added scholar no.4.

This went on for a while. Buy a coffin became ‘kaufen’ which means to buy.

“Tanzen can be to dance. Trinken can mean to drink”, said scholar no.2.

“Ah so it is a distinction without a difference. Smart”, scholar no.3 praised him.

And that’s how ‘Ach so’ came to existence.

After a while they were done with putting letters together and grunting the English words, the big boss walked in for a ruling. He skimmed the literature and was surprised at the jaw dropping work. He found one of the scholars with a long face.

“What happened? Are you not convinced of this?” the boss asked him.

“No I just feel it is incomplete. It is not unique. We need to pitch in some ideas here”, grumbled the sad scholar.

“Alright. Let’s brainstorm”, the boss declared.

“The French don’t pronounce all the letters”, scholar no.1 started.

“Then let’s pronounce them with a passion, right from the gut. Our letters shouldn't feel left out. Don’t hesitate to spit on people’s face while enunciating. What next?” the boss asked.

“Numbers. How do we go about it?” asked scholar no. 3.

“Let’s go from right to left. Start adding the digits from ones place to tens place and so on”, said the boss.

“But the words will grow bigger as the number goes up”, said a worried scholar.

“That’s fine. We will have some of the longest words in the history of languages. That will make it more difficult to learn the language”, the boss replied proudly.

“There is one more thing. The French have diacritical marks. The English have their accent. Indians have ancient Sanskrit. We need something that makes us unique and exotic”, says the sad scholar.

“Don’t you worry about Sanskrit. We got that covered. We really have to compete with the French and the English though. Alright here is the deal. We will pronounce ‘j’ as ‘y’ and ‘v’ as ‘f’. We will also come up with a new letter. Are you happy?” the boss asked irritably.

“Yes!” the scholar screamed with joy.

“‘S’? As you wish. Where ever we spell double ‘s’ we will write a ‘B’ with an extension. Like this ‘ß’. And we will stress the pronunciation to really own the letter. That should do it”, the big boss finalized everything.

Everyone was happy and satisfied.

And that is how my vivid imagination helped me top the class.