Abhijit Naskar's Blog - Posts Tagged "linguistics"

Turkish is the language of love,
Spanish is the language of revolution.
Swedish is the language of resilience,
English is the language of translation.
Portuguese is the language of adventure,
German is the language of discipline.
French is the language of passion,
Italian is the language of cuisine.
With over 7000 languages in the world,
Handful of tongues fall short in a sonnet.
But you can rest assured of one thing,
Every language does something the very best.
Each language is profoundly unique in its own way.
When they come together, they light the human way.

There is a reason I never translate my works,
You can translate information but not sentiment.
So I carve humanity with not one but many tongues,
Yet due to alphabetical wall, much remain unspoken.
Human and culture must grow together in harmony,
All traditions of stagnation must be thrown away.
If a human can come forward across conditioning,
Why can’t a culture do the same and meet halfway!
I sacrificed my language so I could feel you better,
Now I can’t read the tongue of Tagore I was raised in.
Such an uncultured poet whose culture is the world,
Asks the cultures with borders just one little thing.
Take some lessons from Mustafa Kemal in modernizing.
A culture is enhanced, not diminished, by latinizing.

No language speaks of freedom better than spanish,
No language speaks of love better than turkish,
No language speaks of oneness better than sanskrit,
No language interprets better than our good ol’ english.

No language speaks to computers better than code,
No language speaks of matter better than physics.
No language speaks of mind better than neurology,
No language speaks pattern better than mathematics.

No language speaks of thought better than philosophy,
No language speaks of emotion better than poetry.
No language speaks of justice better than sociology,
No language speaks of behavior better than psychology.

Purpose of language is communication not argumentation,
If it doesn’t bridge the cliffs it all brings but extinction.

Language and ideology are not the same thing. Sociology is a language, socialism is an ideology – economics is a language, capitalism is an ideology. Language is an act of communication, ideology is an act of miscommunication. Focus on the language, not the ideology. Because no matter how perfect an ideology appears to be, sooner or later all ideology gets corrupt, particularly because ideology thrives on rigidity – whereas all languages evolve with time at a simple, natural, and almost seamless pace, with no reliance on allegiance and popularity.

“Language is magic, culture is magic,
I wield that magic in my breath.
My brain is a symphony of portals,
each transcending past exclusivity,
into distinct linguocultural awareness.”

“Sonett von El Dorado

Wo ist Eldorado?
Es ist kein Ort,
es ist eine Person.
Wo ist das Himmelreich?
Der Himmel ist kein Ort,
der Himmel sind Menschen.

Wo können wir Freude finden?
Nicht der Markt,
Frieden liegt in guten Taten.
Wo finden wir Gesundheit?
Gesundheit liegt in der Einfachheit,
nicht in Maschinen.

Wo können wir Mut finden?
Mut kommt vom Charakter,
nicht von der Bank.
Was ist der Weg zum Fortschritt?
Nicht durch Luxus,
Fortschritt kommt durch Kollektivität.

Je geringer die Bedürfnisse,
desto besser das Leben.
Verliere dich unter Menschen,
der Weg nach vorne ist Liebe.”

“The world is swarming with snakes,
In your soul brews the antidote.
Churn your doubts, burn your dread,
One gentle gaze sanitizes the cosmos.”

“They ask me, why aren’t you still properly known in the mainstream! Well, the Himalayas have been standing for 40 million years, yet it’s only in the last century that humans first climbed Everest. They are oblivious of me, because once you get addicted to the transcendental terrains of the Himalayas, all your superficial little molehills will crumble to dust.”

How come we can fit the world in our pocket, but not in our heart! Learning a language is one of the tangible endeavors to help eliminate hate from the world. One small step towards a language is one giant leap towards inclusion.

I don’t need to write in all these languages of the world – those who care, will find a way. I write in more than one language because I want to. I want to leave at least something extremely personal for every culture in the world – that is, for as many cultures as I humanly can.

However in the end, the universal spirit of love, light and oneness transcends language and culture, and finds a home in the heart of every conscientious human being – and that’s what counts. It’s the bridge that counts, not the shape it comes in.

When I crossed the hundred books mark, I genuinely thought, “I’m done”. But something happened! I don’t know why, but my drive towards other languages became stronger than ever. I felt, now is the time to make parts of my legacy more accessible to other languages. I have never relied on anyone in my life for the realization of my legacy, so it was obvious that I was not gonna wait for somebody else to translate my works for me. Besides, when somebody else translates an original literature into another language, it always remains a translation – it can never become an original literature of that language and culture. This I absolutely did not want.

Sure, other than Turkish and Spanish, I have difficulty with other languages – that is, I am not at all fluent in them. But the point is, once I feel the language and culture in my veins, I can deliver my ideas in any language I want. And I’ve been doing exactly that over the years – absorbing as many cultures and languages into my bloodstream as I can that is. If you tear my heart open, you can find every single culture in the world, caringly placed and nurtured. Some call it gift, I call it intention.

I don’t have any one native culture,
for I am native to every culture.
I am a native to the whole world,
I am a native to neighborhood earth.

I can write in any language, because I want to. And no, I don’t use some fancy AI tools. In fact, I have an uncompromising principle against the use of AI in literature. Heck, I opted not to use something so trivial as an image containing yours truly with a mace, as cover image of “Bulletproof Backbone”, because it collided with the book’s anti-weaponry vision – so you can imagine my stance on fraudulent material generated by AI!

What I do use, while writing in other languages, is old-fashioned dictionary – online dictionary that is, to fix things like spelling, missing vocabulary and other broken bits – which makes me a broken polyglot. And believe you me, broken polyglots are potent polyglots. I may not be fluent in a lot of languages, but after I am long gone, each of these languages and cultures will have something distinctly personal left by me to call their own.

For example, I may not speak fluent German, yet if I write even one page in the German language, it’ll forever become an indelible part of the German culture. It’ll not be some off-key German translation of an original Naskar, rather it’ll be a German literature from the vast Naskarean oeuvre.

Sure, I know my limits in each of these languages, that’s why I keep my sentence structure simple, which I am not compelled to do in Turkish and Spanish. But more than my limits, I am aware of my limitlessness. And once the being transcends the limits of language, culture, border and tradition, puny apparatus like intellect is bound to follow.

Languages are not ornaments,
languages are organs,
channeling spirit from the heart.

Language is highway to a culture,
language requires a vessel, not translator.
Soon earbuds will feature instant translation,
which will render crosscultural conversation seamless,
but at the same time, lifeless, hollow and cold.

Until we develop the brain technology
to communicate meaning telepathically
without talking, no amount of translation
can carry the warmth, nuances and
sentiment of a lived language.

As added perk, speaking more than one language
delays age-related cognitive decline.
Therefore no matter how you look at it,
one broken second language is far more
valuable than all the mass-produced subtitles.

How will you know if you
can speak another language?

If you can curse someone
on impulse without memorizing,
you got the language in your gut.
If you can console someone in pain,
the language nestles in your heart.

No es necessario que hablar guapisimo,
solamente necessario que hablar amable.
All those pedestals of language levels,
a, b, z, and what not, are elitist garbage.

Chase after form,
and you’ll miss the soul –
throw yourself into the soul,
and neurons will regrow.

Forget grammar, forget vocabulary,
let the language seep into your bloodstream.
In a world infested with medal-seeking mules,
stand odd, stand ablaze, a drunken pilgrim.