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        'One goes to the potter for pots, but not to the grammarian for words. Language is already there among the people'

                                                                                                                                               -Patanjali in Mahabhashya

        In his historic work 'AN ENTYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF SOUTH ASIAN LANGUAGES', published by Asian Development Bank, Manila, Philippines, Dr S Kalyanaraman states: 'In philology, as in archaeology, the search for 'truth' is an extension of a researcher's imagination. Imagination is not an act of faith, but a statement of hypothesis based on relational entities in linguistic structures identified through painstaking lexical work. Two such entities in linguistic structures are: morpheme and sememe which bind an etymological group. Sememe may be defined as a phoneme imbued with 'meaning'. Morpheme is defined as a 'meaningful' linguistic unit. Sememe constitutes the semantic substratum of a morpheme or simply, 'meaning'. What is 'meaning'? It is a concept closely linked to a social compact for inter-personal communication. The 'private language' of a speaker's brain (with 'personal' experiences embedded in neutral networks) is revealed through sounds uttered by the speaker. Language is formed if these uttered sounds echo the 'private language' of a listener. Such an echo constitutes meaning or the semantic sub-structure of a language. Sememes are the basic semantic structural units of a language which combine to yield morphemes or words. A sememe can, for example, be distinguished from a phoneme or a gesture which does not communicate a message in a social compact. Only those uttered sounds which are heard and accepted in a social compact can constitute the repertoire of a language. Sememes (or, dhatupada' ) are given a variety of phonemic and morphological forms in the lingua franca to constitute semantic expressions, or the vocabulary of an evolving and growing civilization'.

        Ramana Maharishi asked the question: 'Who am I?' Likewise Dr S Kalyanaraman asks the introspective question: 'What is the justification for this comparative etymological dictionary of South Asian languages currently spoken by over a billion people of the world?' He says that an answer can be given at a number of levels:

        1) The paramount need to bring people closer to ancient heritage of South Asian language family of which the extant South Asian languages (Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda language streams ) are but dialectical forms.

        2) There is an imperative international public need to generate further studies in the disciplines of a) South Asian archaeology, b) general semantics and comparative linguistics , c) design of fifth-generation computer systems

        3) There is a need to provide a basis for further studies in grammatical philosophy and neurosciences on the formation of semantic patterns or structures in the human brain—— neurosciences related to the study of linguistic competence which seems to set apart the humans from other living beings.

        Finally Dr Kalyanaraman declares with magisterial clarity: 'The urgent warrant for my etymological dictionary is the difficulty faced by scholars in collating different lexicons and in obtaining works such as CDIAL (A Comparative Dictionary of Indo-Aryan Languages) even in eminent libraries. In tracing the etyma (literally meaning truth in Greek) of the South Asian languages, it is adequate to indicate the word forms which can be traced into the mists of history'.

        Dr Kalyanaraman's Dictionary deals with more than 8000 semantic clusters relating to the South Asian Languages. Overarching this vast region——in geographical, linguistic and cultural terms——there is an areal 'South Asian Language Type'. Dr.Kalyanaraman seeks to prove this fact by establishing a semantic concordance among the so called Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda languages. This area covers a geographical region bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south and the mountain ranges which insulate it from other regions of the Asian Continent on the north, east and west.

        The semantic clustering attempted by Dr.Kalyanaraman in this Dictionary rests on the following hypothesis:

        1 It is possible to reconstruct a proto-South Asian idiom or lingua franca of circa the centuries traversed by the Indus Valley Civilization (C.2500 to 1700 BC)

        2 South Asia is a linguistic area nursed in the cradle of the Indus Valley Civilization.

        Operating within this framework, Dr Kalyanaraman summarily rejects the two long standing and earlier assertions:

        a) Sir William Jones's assertion in 1786 of an Indo-European Linguistic Family

        b) F W Ellis's assertion in 1816 of a southern family of languages.

        This cleavage was mischievously created by the Colonial British Rulers as a part of their strategy of Divide and Rule. Dr Kalyanaraman also dismisses the exclusion of the so-called Austro-Asiatic or Munda (or Kherwari) languages. His thesis is that there was a proto-South Asian Linguistic area (C 2500 BC) which included these three language groups. His underlying assumption is that the so-called Dravidian, Munda and Aryan Languages can be traced to an ancient South Asian Family by establishing the unifying elements in semantic terms. This is in keeping with the views of G.U.Pope in another context: ..that between the languages of Southern India and those of the Aryan family there are many deeply seated and radical affinities; that the differences between the Dravidian tongues and the Aryan are not as great as that between the Celtic for instance and the Sanskrit. It is in this spirit that Dr Kalyanaraman has dedicated this great dictionary to Panini and Tolkappiyam

        Reading this fascinating book, we understand that each language is only in part an individual instrument. It is in the main, a community instrument used for community purposes. As such each language tends to launch out on a career of its own, to which individuals contribute very much as the coral insect contributes to the growth of a coral reef or island. The essence of language lies in the intentional conveyance of ideas from one living being to another through the instrumentality of arbitrary tokens or symbols agreed upon and understood by both as being associated with the particular ideas in question. In short language in this world is for keeping things safe in their places. Martin Heidegger rightly says that language is the house of being.

        Words are but the signs and counters of knowledge, and their currency should be strictly regulated by the capital which they represent. The finest words in the world are only vain sounds, if you cannot comprehend. Words, when written, crystallize history; their very structure gives permanence to the unchangeable past. Francis Bacon said; 'men suppose their reason has command over their words; still it happens that words in return exercise authority on reason'. Words may be either servants or masters. If they are servants, they may safely guide us in the way of truth. If they become our masters, they intoxicate the brain and lead into swamps of confused thoughts where there is no solid footing.

        Language is the amber in which thousands of precious thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested thousands of lightening-flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing as the lightning. Samuel Taylor Coleridge rightly observes: 'Language is the armoury of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests'.

        We can infer the spirit of a nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years of social history has contributed a stone. And, universally, a good example of this social force is the veracity of language, which cannot be debauched. In this context Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly sums up: 'In any controversy concerning morals, an appeal may be made with safety to the sentiments which the language of the people expresses. Proverbs, words and grammar-inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision than the wisest individual'.

        Language contains so faithful a record of the good and of the evil which in time past have been working in the minds and hearts of men, we shall not err, if we regard it as a moral barometer indicating and permanently marking the rise or fall of a nation's life. No wonder Noah Webster in his Preface to the great AMERICAN DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLIGH LANGUAGE wrote in 1828: 'Language is the expression of ideas; and if the people of our country cannot preserve an identity of ideas, they cannot retain an identity of language'.

        Viewed in this light language is the most valuable single possession of the human race. Man does not live on bread alone: his other indispensable necessity is communication. We shall never approach a complete understanding of the nature of language, so long as we confine our attention to its intellectual function as a means of communicating thought. Language is a form of human reason, which has its reasons which are unknown to man. The mastery over reality, both technical and social, grows side by side with the knowledge of how to use a language—more particularly words. A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging. In all senses it is the skin of living thought.

        I enjoyed reading this Dictionary by Dr Kalyanaraman. I would pay my tribute to his work in the words of W H Auden: 'Though a work of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously 'truer' than others, some doubtful, some obviously false and some absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary, rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its reader, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.'