Part-2
Script
India’s official and national language is Hindi and is written in Devanagiri script which, since the 19th century AD has been the most commonly used script for writing Sanskrit. Devanagiri is part of the Brahmic family of scripts of India, Nepal, Tibet, and South East Asia. But Pali Canon (Pali:Tipitaka) composed in Northern India and preserved orally until it was committed to writing during the Fourth Buddhist Council in Sri Lanka in 29 BCE, about 450 years after the death of Gautama Buddha, was and is the script used to record standard collection of scriptures in the Theravada Buddhist tradition.
When the British came to rule India, they found it absolutely necessary to have a national system of romanization of the Indic languages and initially adopted a transliteration method developed by Charles Wilkins. William Jones, founder of Asiatic Society, further developed the transliteration method. Later, William Wilson Hunter, then Surveyor General of India improved the method further which was adopted on May 28, 1872 by India Council amidst strong opposition. But this Hunterian method gained official and academic acceptance as it was found inherently simpler and extensible to several Indic scripts and systematized grapheme transliteration.
The point I am trying to highlight is that howsoever useful the Hunterian method of romanization of Indian languages and dialects, the system was never intended for application to Sino-Tibetan, Tibeto-Burman group of languages of which more than 40-odd Zo dialects are included. When the first two missionaries- F.W.Savidge and J.H.Lorrain- came to Mizoram in 1894, they reduced the Lushai Language into writing by adopting simple Roman script with 24 letters and a phonetic form of spelling based on Hunterian system as closely as possible. Writing in the Preface of his monumental ‘Dictionary of the Lushai Language’, James Herbert Lorrain (Pu Buanga) said, “The one particular in which we found it necessary to deviate from it to any extent was in the use of ‘aw’ for the long vowel sound as in the English words of all, fall, law etc. For the short vowel sound as in the English words pot, on, long etc., however, we adhered to the Hunterian system and used ‘o’ which at first seemed to be quite satisfactory”.
Later, emendation was introduced by adopting ‘aw’ to represent both long and short sounds by placing a circumflex accent (^) on the long one (âw, Âw) to distinguish it from the short one ‘aw, Aw’. This where the culprit lies. Written English uses a number of digraphs such as aw, ch, sh, th, tr, wh, qu etc but they are not considered separate letters as they treat aw, ch, ng, and tr with a dot (.) under t as separate letters in our alphabet. Some traditions also use two ligatures, (Œ, Æ, œ, æ) for example, encyclopædia, and consider ampersand (&) part of the alphabet. But in modern English, especially in American English, a lone ‘e’ has mostly supplanted ae or oe, (for example, encyclopedia for encyclopaedia, and fetus for foetus).
One false introduction of digraph with which we got entangled for more than a century is the dot under t which we pronounce as ‘tri’. Phonemically, what we call ‘tri’ is a combination of two sounds ‘t’ and ‘r’ and cannot form a single letter. It is like a combination of two letters h+r (hra, hraw, hre, hri, hro, hru) for which Pu Buanga did not introduce a single letter like he did on t+r. Why? Because the English language has no words starting with h+r combination except as an abbreviated form for hours (hrs). A person who can pronounce ‘Hranga’ should not have a problem in pronouncing ‘Tranga’; if he or she has, that’s bordering on lunacy. There are no other consonant letter combination like hr & tr in our language except in borrowed but localized words restricted to the letter ‘k+r’ sound, for example kristien, Krista, kristmas, krustal, kros and also directly borrowed words (d+r) like drama, driver, driving, draw, drawer, drawing etc.
The tragic part of our situation is our reluctance to accept the need for change. This is the result of our failure to examine ourselves of what we are. We are under an illusion that we have a developed system of writing and a rich literature and what is needed is to preserve the so-called our imagined tradition and culture. Truth is the opposite. We have invented a glorious and mythical homeland called Sinlung through the courtesy of Hranglien Songate, our first historian; and from there travelled across the great Himalayan mountains he called ‘Himalawi’ because we cleverly and successfully negotiated and circumvented it; entered the Shan settlement which he identified as the present Shan State in Myanmar (Burma); crossed the big river called Airawdung (Irrawady River) by means of bamboo raft; came into Kabaw Valley, planted a banyan tree at Khampat that grew into a big tree with its branches touching the ground, a sign and a promise that when that thing came about, some of us would return to the ancestral home for resettlement; climbed the rugged Chin Hills, settled there for three to four hundred years and then some of us moved further west into Chittagong Hills Tract, Tripura, Assam, Manipur and Mizoram where majority of our ethnic group settled.
A closer look into our history, especially our cultural history from available oral traditions, would show that we are not as old as what we tried to project ourselves to be. We were given alphabet in only 1894 to reduce our language and oral traditions into writing, thanks to the arrival of the British colonial forces followed by missionaries. The first reduction of Hmar into writing in this given alphabet was the translation of the gospel of Mark by Rev. Sandy published in 1920; publication of the first collection of Hmar hymns in 1923 under the guidance of Edwin Rowlands (which later became Independent Kohran Hla Bu); the first publication of New Testament in Hmar in 1946 and the Holy Bible in 1968; the first Hmar History book by Hranglien Songate in 1959; the first and perhaps the only Hmar history of culture and literature entitled ‘Hmar Hla Suina’ (1980-81) written by me between 1974-78 from Delhi & Nairobi. It was in this book that I used the alphabet first introduced in 1894 by J.H. Lorrain which he explained in the preface of his Dictionary quoted above in the third paragraph of this article.
Through years of experience in writing Hmar, I encountered many difficulties in reducing the spoken words into writing with only one diacritic mark (^) for both long and short sounds which is ridiculous. You cannot be both tall and short. One cannot serve two masters, said Jesus Christ. One way of reducing atleast 25-35 percent of our problem is to use ‘o’ followed by a consonant for short vowel sound and ‘aw’ for long vowel sound which is intrinsically the sound it represents. In fact, since ‘aw’ (a+w) by itself is a long vowel sound, putting a diacritic long sound ‘^’ above ‘a’ is not only superfluous but also unscientific and childish. The emphasis while pronouncing a word falls on the vowel letter where the diacritic long sound mark ‘^’ is placed. Try to pronounce ‘âw’ following this principle, it never comes right. By doing it, you will earn nothing but an object of ridicule from the hearers. Try and see. It’s not funny. It’s self-incrimination.
The funny part of this drama was that for a few years since the introduction, many in the elite group appreciated it and a good number of them expressed their appreciation in writings, some of which are still in my file. A good number of initial detractors turned around and adopted in their writing. The first edition of LENRUOL HLA BU (1979) followed suit and Dr. Rochunga Pudaite also adopted in the Millenium (2000) Edition of Hmar Bible. It keeps growing as younger generation studying in English medium automatically has come to adopt it. In course of time, new detractors have also appeared and even those who expressed their appreciation in writing have recanted their position not because of the issue involved but for consideration of new equations which made them withdrawn to their respective denominational camps. The blood cancer that has been eating away the sinews of the society is infiltrating and spreading everywhere. The Coleman factor grows stronger day by day.
The ground reality is that we need reforms, a change of heart and a new approach. We need to develop a new generation with a reading habit for which we have to provide them reading materials like newspapers, magazines and books. But we are not producing readable writings to attract readers. So they don’t read. Poor readership stunts and kills the growth of language and literature. Literature-by-order as reflected in our MIL subjects are no substitute to growth of language and literature. If our monthly church magazines are of any indication to our condition, we are sterile creatures in thought and action. I wonder if heaven accepts such lost souls, zombies fed with empty words from the ‘very very’ pulpit.
We need a fresh look at the script we have been using without question for more than a century. We have to modify it to suit our present needs without adding and substracting of the English alphabet and do away with all digraphs such as aw, ch and ng and a dot under t which we calls it ‘tri’ as these letters are already in the alphabet as single letters and they should not stand as separate letters in the alphabet. We have to change the sound of ‘g’ as pronounced like ‘ex’ in the past. We have to teach children how to use ‘j’ and ‘z’ correctly and discourage the use of ‘z’ in places where ‘j’ is to be used in elongated sound and ‘z’ in short sound without the need to use any diacritic mark. Correct usage of ‘j’ and ‘z’ itself may take away 15-20 per cent of our problems. And many more.
The tragedy facing us at present is that whenever we talk of the need to reform usage of our alphabet, certain section of our vaunted elites with their ignorant followers thought that we are trying to impose the correct use of ‘aw, o and tr’ which they wrongly believe that such improvements will seriously impact on the development of our language and literature and take away its uniqueness. Nothing could be further from the truth. But a twisted mind is a strange thing as it believes in what it wants to believe, whatever false the truth may be. (To be continued)
December 28, 2013. Delhi.
Script
India’s official and national language is Hindi and is written in Devanagiri script which, since the 19th century AD has been the most commonly used script for writing Sanskrit. Devanagiri is part of the Brahmic family of scripts of India, Nepal, Tibet, and South East Asia. But Pali Canon (Pali:Tipitaka) composed in Northern India and preserved orally until it was committed to writing during the Fourth Buddhist Council in Sri Lanka in 29 BCE, about 450 years after the death of Gautama Buddha, was and is the script used to record standard collection of scriptures in the Theravada Buddhist tradition.
When the British came to rule India, they found it absolutely necessary to have a national system of romanization of the Indic languages and initially adopted a transliteration method developed by Charles Wilkins. William Jones, founder of Asiatic Society, further developed the transliteration method. Later, William Wilson Hunter, then Surveyor General of India improved the method further which was adopted on May 28, 1872 by India Council amidst strong opposition. But this Hunterian method gained official and academic acceptance as it was found inherently simpler and extensible to several Indic scripts and systematized grapheme transliteration.
The point I am trying to highlight is that howsoever useful the Hunterian method of romanization of Indian languages and dialects, the system was never intended for application to Sino-Tibetan, Tibeto-Burman group of languages of which more than 40-odd Zo dialects are included. When the first two missionaries- F.W.Savidge and J.H.Lorrain- came to Mizoram in 1894, they reduced the Lushai Language into writing by adopting simple Roman script with 24 letters and a phonetic form of spelling based on Hunterian system as closely as possible. Writing in the Preface of his monumental ‘Dictionary of the Lushai Language’, James Herbert Lorrain (Pu Buanga) said, “The one particular in which we found it necessary to deviate from it to any extent was in the use of ‘aw’ for the long vowel sound as in the English words of all, fall, law etc. For the short vowel sound as in the English words pot, on, long etc., however, we adhered to the Hunterian system and used ‘o’ which at first seemed to be quite satisfactory”.
Later, emendation was introduced by adopting ‘aw’ to represent both long and short sounds by placing a circumflex accent (^) on the long one (âw, Âw) to distinguish it from the short one ‘aw, Aw’. This where the culprit lies. Written English uses a number of digraphs such as aw, ch, sh, th, tr, wh, qu etc but they are not considered separate letters as they treat aw, ch, ng, and tr with a dot (.) under t as separate letters in our alphabet. Some traditions also use two ligatures, (Œ, Æ, œ, æ) for example, encyclopædia, and consider ampersand (&) part of the alphabet. But in modern English, especially in American English, a lone ‘e’ has mostly supplanted ae or oe, (for example, encyclopedia for encyclopaedia, and fetus for foetus).
One false introduction of digraph with which we got entangled for more than a century is the dot under t which we pronounce as ‘tri’. Phonemically, what we call ‘tri’ is a combination of two sounds ‘t’ and ‘r’ and cannot form a single letter. It is like a combination of two letters h+r (hra, hraw, hre, hri, hro, hru) for which Pu Buanga did not introduce a single letter like he did on t+r. Why? Because the English language has no words starting with h+r combination except as an abbreviated form for hours (hrs). A person who can pronounce ‘Hranga’ should not have a problem in pronouncing ‘Tranga’; if he or she has, that’s bordering on lunacy. There are no other consonant letter combination like hr & tr in our language except in borrowed but localized words restricted to the letter ‘k+r’ sound, for example kristien, Krista, kristmas, krustal, kros and also directly borrowed words (d+r) like drama, driver, driving, draw, drawer, drawing etc.
The tragic part of our situation is our reluctance to accept the need for change. This is the result of our failure to examine ourselves of what we are. We are under an illusion that we have a developed system of writing and a rich literature and what is needed is to preserve the so-called our imagined tradition and culture. Truth is the opposite. We have invented a glorious and mythical homeland called Sinlung through the courtesy of Hranglien Songate, our first historian; and from there travelled across the great Himalayan mountains he called ‘Himalawi’ because we cleverly and successfully negotiated and circumvented it; entered the Shan settlement which he identified as the present Shan State in Myanmar (Burma); crossed the big river called Airawdung (Irrawady River) by means of bamboo raft; came into Kabaw Valley, planted a banyan tree at Khampat that grew into a big tree with its branches touching the ground, a sign and a promise that when that thing came about, some of us would return to the ancestral home for resettlement; climbed the rugged Chin Hills, settled there for three to four hundred years and then some of us moved further west into Chittagong Hills Tract, Tripura, Assam, Manipur and Mizoram where majority of our ethnic group settled.
A closer look into our history, especially our cultural history from available oral traditions, would show that we are not as old as what we tried to project ourselves to be. We were given alphabet in only 1894 to reduce our language and oral traditions into writing, thanks to the arrival of the British colonial forces followed by missionaries. The first reduction of Hmar into writing in this given alphabet was the translation of the gospel of Mark by Rev. Sandy published in 1920; publication of the first collection of Hmar hymns in 1923 under the guidance of Edwin Rowlands (which later became Independent Kohran Hla Bu); the first publication of New Testament in Hmar in 1946 and the Holy Bible in 1968; the first Hmar History book by Hranglien Songate in 1959; the first and perhaps the only Hmar history of culture and literature entitled ‘Hmar Hla Suina’ (1980-81) written by me between 1974-78 from Delhi & Nairobi. It was in this book that I used the alphabet first introduced in 1894 by J.H. Lorrain which he explained in the preface of his Dictionary quoted above in the third paragraph of this article.
Through years of experience in writing Hmar, I encountered many difficulties in reducing the spoken words into writing with only one diacritic mark (^) for both long and short sounds which is ridiculous. You cannot be both tall and short. One cannot serve two masters, said Jesus Christ. One way of reducing atleast 25-35 percent of our problem is to use ‘o’ followed by a consonant for short vowel sound and ‘aw’ for long vowel sound which is intrinsically the sound it represents. In fact, since ‘aw’ (a+w) by itself is a long vowel sound, putting a diacritic long sound ‘^’ above ‘a’ is not only superfluous but also unscientific and childish. The emphasis while pronouncing a word falls on the vowel letter where the diacritic long sound mark ‘^’ is placed. Try to pronounce ‘âw’ following this principle, it never comes right. By doing it, you will earn nothing but an object of ridicule from the hearers. Try and see. It’s not funny. It’s self-incrimination.
The funny part of this drama was that for a few years since the introduction, many in the elite group appreciated it and a good number of them expressed their appreciation in writings, some of which are still in my file. A good number of initial detractors turned around and adopted in their writing. The first edition of LENRUOL HLA BU (1979) followed suit and Dr. Rochunga Pudaite also adopted in the Millenium (2000) Edition of Hmar Bible. It keeps growing as younger generation studying in English medium automatically has come to adopt it. In course of time, new detractors have also appeared and even those who expressed their appreciation in writing have recanted their position not because of the issue involved but for consideration of new equations which made them withdrawn to their respective denominational camps. The blood cancer that has been eating away the sinews of the society is infiltrating and spreading everywhere. The Coleman factor grows stronger day by day.
The ground reality is that we need reforms, a change of heart and a new approach. We need to develop a new generation with a reading habit for which we have to provide them reading materials like newspapers, magazines and books. But we are not producing readable writings to attract readers. So they don’t read. Poor readership stunts and kills the growth of language and literature. Literature-by-order as reflected in our MIL subjects are no substitute to growth of language and literature. If our monthly church magazines are of any indication to our condition, we are sterile creatures in thought and action. I wonder if heaven accepts such lost souls, zombies fed with empty words from the ‘very very’ pulpit.
We need a fresh look at the script we have been using without question for more than a century. We have to modify it to suit our present needs without adding and substracting of the English alphabet and do away with all digraphs such as aw, ch and ng and a dot under t which we calls it ‘tri’ as these letters are already in the alphabet as single letters and they should not stand as separate letters in the alphabet. We have to change the sound of ‘g’ as pronounced like ‘ex’ in the past. We have to teach children how to use ‘j’ and ‘z’ correctly and discourage the use of ‘z’ in places where ‘j’ is to be used in elongated sound and ‘z’ in short sound without the need to use any diacritic mark. Correct usage of ‘j’ and ‘z’ itself may take away 15-20 per cent of our problems. And many more.
The tragedy facing us at present is that whenever we talk of the need to reform usage of our alphabet, certain section of our vaunted elites with their ignorant followers thought that we are trying to impose the correct use of ‘aw, o and tr’ which they wrongly believe that such improvements will seriously impact on the development of our language and literature and take away its uniqueness. Nothing could be further from the truth. But a twisted mind is a strange thing as it believes in what it wants to believe, whatever false the truth may be. (To be continued)
December 28, 2013. Delhi.
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