A language is something which has the ability to relay a message from one medium to another. Beauty of a language though, is to receive a message in the pure form, keep it unpolluted throughout and deliver it as it was without changing the size and shape of the content inside.
A close analogy could be the cellular network. When you are talking on your phone and the voice from the other side is not clear, you say the network is bad. But when the voice is same as the person sitting next to you, the network is good.
Cellular network is a language in which two distant gadgets communicate with each other. And the beauty of the network depends on its ability to relay unpolluted messages from one side to the other.
This is going to be a series of articles about the beauty of Sanskrit language. In this first, introductory article, we will try to observe how a language is perceived as beautiful, how has classical languages evolved and where Sanskrit stands. Though I am very fond of Sanskrit, but I will try to be as unbiased as possible.
Let’s start with the most common question which might have already arrived in your mind by now,
Which is the most beautiful language?
When asked, everyone has their own fondness for their mother tongue plus European languages particularly, French, Italian, Spanish and German; in an order much aligned with their exposure to the speakers of these languages and literature associated with them. Also the order of arrangement for liking does not correlate to their fluency in the language.
Take this survey on Duolingo forum for instance. You can clearly witness that the choice of preference is highly relative to the person’s exposure to the listed languages. Here are my observations after going through this duolingo forum post and through hundreds of blogs we land when searching for ‘the most beautiful language’ on google. I also took the liberty to read through the work of some prominent linguists like Robert Phillipson who coined the term Linguistic Imperialism which is defined on wikipedia as “Linguistic imperialism is defined as the transfer of a dominant language to other people. This language transfer comes about because of imperialism. The transfer is considered to be a demonstration of power; traditionally military power but also, in the modern world, economic power. Aspects of the dominant culture are usually transferred along with the language” and Ghil’ad Zuckermann who is a well known linguistic and language revivalist and proponent of the term ‘Linguicide’ which means language genocide. I found 3 kind of patterns that leads to people believing a language to be beautiful:
- Liking for a language is directly related to the language’s genetic relationship with the speaker’s mother tongue.
- Intergenetic language preference comes from the speaker’s place of belonging where there was a prominent second language which came into mainstream post colonial era as a result of linguistic imperialism.
- Professional choice for a particular language, culture or country and hence need to learn a language.
But after further investigation, the core of beauty in the beholder’s eye for a language boils down to only two factors:
#1. Conditioning: Mother tongue for example, is the most beautiful language for a majority of individuals. That is the strongest conditioning one can have. Conditioning also means your familiarity with particular language (or a form of language) through a consistent exposure over time. For example, people who are familiar with the consonant clusters (such as words like selbstverständlich) may develop liking for the German and Russian languages but these may sound weird to a native English or Hindi speaker who was never exposed to such forms of speaking. Chinese speakers use pitch to convey the meaning of a word while English speakers convey emotion using pitch hence chinese get a weird accent while speaking English and stretch the vowels a lot. But Chinese speakers find all tonal languages beautiful. Similarly people who have been speaking English for a while find French, Italian etc very familiar and beautiful due to the genetic connection of these languages which is still evident in the tonality. In the case of conditioning, you may not learn to speak a language but you start to correlate the expressions and actions with the words or sound. So when you, even lightly, hear a similar language, you try to understand it. This alone may lead to liking but if the next point is also valid, the liking is sure to happen.
#2. Authority: In India, bhojpuri speakers don’t feel confident in speaking bhojpuri publicly. A majority of people don’t feel good about talking in their own mother tongue in India and prefer to speak in English citing they will be valued more. That doesn’t mean they don’t find their native language beautiful but people speaking English are considered educated and professionally well off. Maybe that comes from hundreds of years of foreign dominance. The truth is, we tend to prefer a language as more valuable when it is coming from a person or group of authority. This value or authority leads to aspiration to learn and hence a human mind develops liking. The popularity of English, French, Italian and to some countries German post colonial era are some good examples of languages which have dominated a good part of the world through colonisation earlier and liberalisation through technology now which has led to linguistic imperialism of centuries making European languages, spoken as second language throughout the world. The best part is, they have some very good literature to reward anyone who has learned to speak these languages. This is the reason why these languages are voted most beautiful by a larger group of people.
But,
All of these online available surveys and blogs done to find the most beautiful language are largely defining the socio-lingual-beauty of the listed languages which comes from the bias developed due to the above mentioned factors. So if three-fourth of the online population speaks only Mandarian or Hindi, then through voting, these two languages can be termed as most beautiful. Which is not the right way and indeed subjective.
The beauty of a language, on the other hand, can be defined on the basis of their ability to convey unpolluted messages. In the modern scientific language, there are now three streams of language study which defines the effect of any language on a human as a whole. These are sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics.
Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of society on language and vice versa as we popularily know.
Psycholinguistics is the study of the relation between language processing and its effect on the human brain.
Neurolinguistics is the study of the neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of any language.
So the beauty of a language will be its ability to process and convey the social value, the psychological value and the neurological value from one medium to the other along with having the ability to sound good to the listener and also have rich literature.
In a nutshell, the beauty of a language depends majorly on three factors then:
1- Ease to speak for a completely unfamiliar person.
2- Richness of the literature for it to become rewarding, post someone learns to read and speak.
3- Its effect on the society, psychology and neurology of the speaker and the listener without losing the three-fold data from speaker to listener.
I am no expert in linguistics, neither do I know all the western languages ancient or modern. But with a certain confidence, I can surely argue on the above mentioned reasoning, why I find Sanskrit to be very beautiful. There could be any other languages in the world which also find its place to be called beautiful and I am very open to analyse if someone can recommend one.
In the next few posts, I will clarify, with all the above mentioned pointers, why Sanskrit qualifies to be ‘the beautiful language’.
Next post: How easy is Sanskrit language?
