"Blah" and more "Blahs"...

I had been suffering from Writer's Block! The words wouldn’t come. It’s been long, really long, since I last blogged. And even now, I am blank on what I should write about. I don’t feel armed enough to just let my fingers loose on the keyboard without much knowledge of the outcome. There is nobody to blame, but my own lethargic self. I know that’s just wordplay. But hey, isn’t that what I have always planned to do?

I’ve been thinking about my love for language since morning today. I have developed this interest of learning the etymology of certain words I come across. This all started when I was preparing for my GRE exam, thanks to Norman Lewis! His book – Word Power Made Easy, truly makes people fall in love with a “language”, any language for that matter. So it just occurred to me today while I was looking for a time-killer activity in office, and I looked for the etymology of the word “rice” over the web. I already had a little idea that the word has its root in “Tamil” language, in fact “Sanskrit”. The Wikipedia page I came across listed many more words that originate from Indian languages, mostly from Sanskrit – the most decorated and structured language (and hence its name)!

And as it must have been experienced by many, in fact all of us Wiki-users, I jumped through pages to land-up savouring “Pulav” (or pilaf, plaf, pulao etc. etc.). The word is for a rice dish, which we all know. What fascinated me was the fact that almost all major languages in the World (among many other not-so-known languages the names of which I can’t even pronounce) share this word for that dish. It is even more shared than the words “father” and “mother”.

I have always wondered how it all might have started, the variations in different languages. Why would a certain group of Neolithic homo-sapiens (or their ancestors) have to choose or develop a language different from what other group was speaking. Where did it all bifurcate. May be it was because of geographical boundaries that various communities developed their styles of verbal communication independently. But given that, how come they ultimately land up sharing some words for common references. Would they not have already developed a word for, say “father” or mother”, in their own distinguished language before they started interacting with other communities? I so want a time-machine to go back to see it all happening.

The history of languages has got to be as biased as any other history, with no concrete and neutral source of definite knowledge. People have been involved in long term debates on whether Tamil is the most primitive Indic language, or Kannada or Bangla. Whatever...!! I just relish the beauty of languages and look out for every possible chance to learn a new word in some language.