"If you're so fond of Kannada, why use an English word in the song?"
"One can't get the same effect out of a classical Kannada word as from 'ಕರೆಂಟು'. By the way, it is a Kannada word."
I was in the second standard, if I remember right. And this is a snippet from a conversation I had with my auto-driver, well, auto-uncle, back then. He used to cavil at my not-up-to-the-mark Kannada diction. Of course, my diction wasn't chaste, but it was underpinned by 'sound' logic.
For example, flower in my mother tongue - strictly speaking, a pidgin of Tamil, English and Kannada - is the Tamil word 'ಪೂವ್' (poov, with a stress on the ending sound), while the Kannada equivalent is a very close 'ಹೂವು' (hoovu). I'd observed that the only change was in how the word began with a 'hoo' rather than a 'poo', and thought this could be the formula for translation. No, I did not know mathematical induction back then.
One evening, on the way back from school, I applied the formula to the word for a 'cat', having had one cross our path and make the driver stop the auto briefly, so that the wind and time may carry away the bad luck. If 'ಪೂನೆ' (poone) was the Tamil word, what would be the Kannada word? You guessed it, 'ಹೂನೆ' (hoone). Unsurprisingly, such diligence on my part justified the auto-driver's grouses, which made them even more unpalatable. So, I was waiting for a chance to bait, and the driver's new favourite song from Sandalwood was but the perfect invite.
The song went - 'ಬಂತು, ಬಂತು ಕರೆಂಟು ಬಂತು...'. It would probably suffice to say that it heralded the traipsing into view of a 'ಕರೆಂಟು' (a case of borrowing 'current' from the English lexicon, and ritually adopting it into Kannada through the suffixing of a 'u', to add the monosyllable from words like put and foot - a sound that now follows the erstwhile Bangalore and Mysore, and iterates the state to which they belong; interestingly, the sense of the word 'current' is also amplified to mean electricity itself.) I believe the suggestion is less veiled post that exposition on the sense of the word, though I'd thought it was about the restoration of power, based solely on the audio thumping out of the speakers the driver had had installed at the back of the seat.
Anyway, at school, I had learnt that ವಿದ್ಯುತ್ ಶಕ್ತಿ (vidyuth shakthi) was the Kannada equivalent for electricity, leading to the banter at the top of the post. The driver actually held 'ದೀಪ' (deepa) to be the Kannada word for electricity, perhaps due to the most visible effect of electricity - the glowing bulbs and fluorescent lights.
But, he was right. Neither 'ದೀಪ' nor 'ವಿದ್ಯುತ್ ಶಕ್ತಿ' would've conveyed what the song intended to. This intent behind exercising the vocabulary - the urge to communicate - is, in my humble opinion, supreme. And whatever agency helps one put across their thoughts best, has to be the best. Language, after all, is linked to the mode of thought. When a mode of thought is itself seen as inadmissible, the language can hardly aid its expression. Thus, the trove of slangs is ever-growing, and the number of enfolded verbal scions ever-rising. Inevitably, the clamour about the dilution of Kannada diction seems a quibble.
Comments