too long; will not read
This article talks about shabd.xyz — an initiative to create a new set of words, phrases and linguistic system that will expand the bank of ideas that can be accessed with Hindi.
If you just want to go through the best handpicked content from shabd.xyz, you can follow the Insta account and you’ll be all set.
If you have 20 minutes, I will share with you my work that I’ve been involved in for the last two months. Keep reading.
The Problem : We are running out of active words in Hindi
Take 15 seconds to look at that red banner. It has 83 words — 63 words in Hindi and 20 words in English (or transliterated English).
Of the 63 Hindi words, 5 are nouns, 3 are verbs (not counting है) and 2 are adjectives. The rest 53 words are prepositions, pronouns and conjunctions.
Of the 20 words in English, 15 are nouns, 2 are adjectives and 3 are verbs.
Nouns, Adjectives and Verbs are active words — they give shape to a language while prepositions, pronouns and conjunctions help glue them.
We see that Hindi is 84% glue and English is 100% structure here.
Even when we compare the active words, the English words ‘Decentralized’ and ‘Digital’ are more advanced than ‘जानकारी’ and ‘घर’.
I noticed this was happening over and over. Indian languages are failing to keep up with abstract concepts of the modern world and we have to rely on English to discuss innovation.
English is evolving, Hindi not so much.
Major dictionaries of the world such as Oxford and Merriam Websiter together add over 1000 new words in English each year. ‘Lit twerking millenials tweeting selfies’ wouldn’t make any sense 10 years back.
This isn’t anything new. Shakespeare, way back in 1600s had incorporated over 10,000 words in English.
I realized that there is no body that creates or ratifies new words in Hindi. It seemed trivial at first, but I gave it some more thought.
So what? Why do we need more words in Hindi?
I have three reasons why Hindi needs to have new words.
A. We aren’t leveraging the power of abstractions enough
Increasingly abstract concepts encapsulate several sub-concepts and thus build up on smaller concepts. Abstract words enable us to convey dense ideas with brevity, thus pushing up our quality of conversations. This pyramidal semantic architecture makes allows ideas of greater complexity to form than words with less abstractions.
Take melancholy for example. While happiness and sadness are universally understood, melancholy seems more like an inside joke — it requires people to have shared an uncommon experience — a feeling of pensive sadness. Words like this help us talk about new ideas with more precision.
In the table I made here, I tried to categorize words in increasing degree of abstractness, from most real (things that can be touched) to most abstract (Concepts that build upon many other concepts, so it is difficult to communicate in one line). For example, even if torque is one word, I need many different concepts like force, angular momentum, rigid body and so on to explain it. When we both understand ‘torque’, we save the time needed to explain the sub components. Similarly, we need high level conceptual words in Hindi to fasten our idea exchanges.
This vagueness of language lets us prototype with ideas — play around with concepts. Hindi seems to have fewer words on the abstract side — meaning we have to trim our feelings into few low level boxes. What we need is to unleash the continuum of ideas that would faciliatate creativity — emerge new sentence structures, ideas and textures in conversations. We need a word that can capture in one word 40% happiness + 35% sadness + 25% numbness, like English can.
B. Bridge the Generational Gap
I have a very shallow vocabulary in common with my grandmother now. Our concepts about life were shaped by different words. While I measure the world with ideas like nihilism, existentialism, hedonism, racism… she does the same with ideas like dharma, mukti, paap, punya and bhakti. In the years to come, if Hindi is unable to provide the right tools to convey contemporary ideas, it will be totally replaced by English — and that English will be nothing like the one we speak today because of the speed of evolution, so we will be the laggards around our kids.
If we don’t want that to happen, we need to polish Hindi, irrigate it with more contemporary ideas.
C. Avoid Intellectual Colonisation
If English becomes the only language for expression, the West will be the sole approver of new words. Linguistic diversity(and thus cognitive diversity acc. to Sapir Whorf hypothesis) is important for the same reasons that genetic diversity is important. While it can be argued that conflicting ideas can be expressed even in just one language, it should be understood that a language isn’t only a set of vocabulary but also the music, rhythm, texture and body language that goes with it. Namastey does not translate to Hello — the former involves me touching someone’s feet or folding my hands while the second involves me shaking hands — two very different body languages and underlying cultural outlooks. We need to preserve the flavors of languages to avoid cognitive homogenity.
Ok, agreed, what’s the solution?
Here are some conclusions I reached after some brain storming.
A. Shifting from Devanagri to Roman Script
Theatres, novels and poetry are no longer the shapers of our linguistic culture. Evolution today takes place through mobile apps, YouTube series and Facebook posts — basically black screens with the QWERTY keyboards.
Our generation today speaks Hindi using the Roman Script. We have to make peace with this. For Hindi to grow and be made easier for others to learn, we should try using A B C D instead of क ख ग घ — it will ensure that we can type it faster, read faster and make it easier for non Hindi speakers to learn Hindi.
B. Focused creation of intangible adjectives and verbs
We don’t really need new words for cow, dog or water. We need new words for India specific abstract concepts. Here are four strategies we can use:
- Steal from other languages: English b̶o̶r̶r̶o̶w̶e̶d̶ stole jungle and juggernaut, karma and avatar, guru and nirvana from India. It also got words from French, Arabic, Spanish and German. We could do the same, Indianizing foreign words (deja vu would become Dizavyu, melancholy would be Melkoli and schadenfreude would become Shadafa)
- Steal from ourselves: We could try improvising Sanskrit and Persian words to make them more mainstream (Jijivisha would become Jiichha, the Odia word “Birakt”, meaning irritated could become Beirakt.
- Poetry with experiences: The most powerful tool would be to shabdifying experiences we faced in our life but didn’t find one word to describe it.
“The feeling of being high in Kasol was so sublime; I was experiencing how fucking detailed the world is, I felt one unity with nature, as if I and the world are the same.” — that’s Kasoli.
Kasoli (noun) — the feeling of finding oneness with the tremendous beauty of nature.
There needn’t be any reason for coming up with this word, if people connect with the story, it will stick.
4. Prefixes and Suffixes
We needn’t just create words but also systems. Hindi already has it. Vidya+Alay is Vidyalaya (House of Learning = School); Him+Alay is Himalaya (House of Snow = Himalya).
Similar partials can be made for concepts we encounter frequently. Internet powered could be -ito (from IoT). So a ‘smart village’ equipped with IoT would be Grammito. A bank with Internet enable would be Bankito, an agricultural field powered by IoT would be called Khetito.
shabd.xyz
shabd.xyz is the web based platform made for this project for people to submit their words. It is a special project for me — it’s the first product I’ve made with ReactJS. The framework ensures that the experience will be fast and robust.
Landing Page
The landing page has a scroll view of the posts arranged by time. Every post has the word/phrase, description and optional media or an example sentence to use the word/phrase.
Every post can be liked or adapted. Like works the same way as you expect. An adapt is a comment with a condition that it should include the word being commented on. This ensures that the people try using the word in a sentence.
Create Page
On the landing page and the Dashboard are links to the Create Page..
A minimal distraction free screen is provided to articulate your thoughts. On continuing, you will have the option of giving an example sentence or a supporting media — a GIF, Video or Image to illustrate your word.
Dashboard Page
On the Dashboard page, you can get notified when someone likes/adapts your words. You can also delete your submitted words.
What results from all this?
I plan to create visuals from the submitted words and collate them on Insta here. The idea is to create conversations around these new words and ponder over abstractness and flexibility of our language.
Thank you for your time.
