Bengaluru techies compile book to revive Kannada words replaced by Sanskrit
Shyam Prasad S / Updated: Aug 24, 2017, 01:00 IST
Bengaluru techies compile book to revive Kannada words replaced by Sanskrit
While cutting of trees is called ‘kadi’ in spoken Kannada, it is for some strange reason called ‘anana’ when written in newspapers and media. Similarly, instead of the Kannada word ‘bere’ (which is used in spoken Kannada) for ‘other’, the Sanskrit word ‘anya’ is preferred by the ‘educ-ated’. There are hundreds of such examples where ‘soundarya’ is replaced with ‘cheluvu’, or ‘nirlakshya’ replaces ‘kadeganane.’
Two techies, along with a popular Kannada linguist, have compiled a book which lists 7,000 such Sanskrit words and at least two Kannada equivalents that are present in spoken Kannada but are being ignored in the written language.
‘Samskruta Padagalige Kannadadde Padagalu’ by DN Shankar Bhat, Y Bharat Kumar and Sandeep Kambi can be called a successor to the book ‘Padanerike’ which was released two years ago. ‘Padanerike’ is an English-Kannada dictionary which gives Kannada equivalents for English words. In that case, a large number of techies and common Kannadigas had even coined hundreds of new words for English words that have come up in recent years. This included Kannada words for things like ‘selfie’ and ‘turbine’.
‘SPKP’ on the other hand did not require the effort to create new Kannada words. Kumar said, “There are two prime reasons for taking up this project. One was the apparent problem of inferiority complex shown in not using Kannada words. The second was how written Kannada becomes difficult and sometimes outright unintelligible. In fact, we source most of the Sanskrit words from Kannada newspapers.” However, there are a few words which were coined for the sake of convenience.
Kumar says that it is not a new attempt to accommodate more Kannada words. He cites the example of the Kittel dictionary and its revised edition. “The Kittel dictionary of 1894 has a large number of Sanskrit words. In 1968, Mariyappa Bhat published the four-volume revised edition of the dictionary. In that edition, he made room for more Kannada words from the Halegannada literature and Vachanas which were not available to Kittel. This was possible by dropping the Sanskrit words. In its preface, he writes that it was necessary to give more space to native words.” he asks.
It took the trio four years to complete the book which, apart from the Kannada words for 7,000 Sanskrit words, also gives phrases and sentences in which they can be used.