Fool’s paradise

A pleasant surprise for me over the last few weeks browsing blogs has been the number of Tamil Blogs on the internet. But, much to my dismay almost all of the Tamil bloggers seem to have been struck by a singluar obession – the urge to communicate in “pure” Tamil. Here's an example : the winner of this year's “Best Indic Indiblog [Tamil]“.

There are quite a few English words that have become part of colloquial Tamil today. Words like bus, car, computer, coffee, tea, brush, toothpaste, soap are de facto Tamil for the man on the street. The sensible thing to do would be to expand the language to include these words, right? Nah. Not for the purists, the people that would rather travel by a “Perundhu” and drink “Kuzhambi”. Dont get it? Don't worry, not many people in Tamil Nadu do either. Go to Madras and ask someone on the street if she uses a “Kanini” (scholarese for a computer) and she'll either laugh you off the street and/or move as far away from you as possible.

So while the rest of the world (Tamil speakers included) browses the web on laptops and clicks on links, the clique of purists would rather use a “MadiKanini” (Gawd!) and use “Chuttis” to traverse the Valai. And by doing so, they hope to influence everyone to follow suit and start talking like them. Go figure. Try as they might, my milkman is always going to say he was “late” because his “cycle” had to undergo “repair.”

Every language changes over time. Change usually starts with the spoken word, and starts reflecting itself in the literature of the time. Look at old English – it is almost unrecognizable from what we speak today. Does that make it a lesser langauge? The gulf between written and spoken words is wide and growing in Tamil : not a healthy trend. A language remains vibrant and young by absorbing words and adapting to change – the more insular it is, the sooner it loses its vigor.

Of course there are exceptions : Dubukku has a delightful little blog written in a conversational tone.