Abstract
Telugu is the 15th largest language of the world with 76 million native speakers. The story of Telugu makes for fascinating reading, like a thriller, containing as it does many mysteries and surprises in linguistic terms. For example, many native speakers of Telugu are hardly aware that words such as chirunāmā (చిరునామా), chukkāni (చుక్కాని), darjā (దర్జా), maidānam (మైదానం), rahadāri (రహదారి), rangu (రంగు) and salahā (సలహా) like more than a 1000 others, are of Turkish, Arabic and Persian origin; and that Telugu is made up of 65% Sanskrit words, the highest in any Indian language. From its humble beginnings as a dialect of the proto-Dravidian about 3,000 years ago Telugu has reached its current stage of development only after undergoing profound changes in lexical terms. To begin with, it borrowed heavily from Pali-Prakrit, then from Sanskrit, still later from the Turkish-Arabic-Persian-Urdu quartet and finally from western languages, especially English, and so enriched itself as to emerge as a major language of the world. In doing so it closely paralleled the story of English in that both the languages had humble beginnings, both came under the influence of hegemonic languages but, instead of being marginalized or driven out of existence altogether, both learnt to survive and thrive. This article seeks to trace the trajectory of Telugu, by frequently comparing it with that of English, in terms of its vocabulary since vocabulary, according to David Crystal, constitutes the most reliable guide to the understanding of the social, intellectual and cultural history of a linguistic community. It then projects Telugu as a metaphor for language survival. Hundreds of Asian languages facing extinction today can draw valuable lessons from Telugu and learn to survive, and indeed even flourish.
Introduction
Telugu is the 15th largest language of the world in terms of both the number of native speakers as estimated by the Swedish encyclopedia Nationalencyklopedin (2007, 2010), and total number of speakers according to Ethnologue: Languages of Asia (2013, 17th edition), with 76 million native speakers constituting 1.15% of world population, and is far ahead of the former and current hegemonic languages such as French, Persian, Turkish and Italian. Among the Indian languages it ranks third after Hindi and Bengali and among the Dravidian languages it is the largest.
Telugu built a formidable vocabulary and consolidated its position by keeping its doors open to loanwords from a variety of donor languages — some native to India, some foreign — and emerged as a major language of the world. David Crystal(A short history of English words, 2011) says in the context of English:
English is a vacuum-cleaner of a language, whose users suck in words from other languages whenever they encounter them. And because of the way English has traveled the world, courtesy of its soldiers, sailors, traders and civil servants, several hundred languages have contributed to its lexical character. Some 80 per cent of English vocabulary is not Germanic at all.
In similar fashion Telugu too absorbed loanwords and grew in strength. It had not traveled though, the way English did. Languages themselves traveled to south India where it is spoken and generously lent their words, compounds and phrases to it. Telugu just stayed where it has always been and silently accepted the linguistic treasures offered by other languages. And yes, 80% of its vocabulary is not proto-Dravidian at all, although it is the rest of the original 20% words of proto-Dravidian origin that figure most frequently (some 80-90 per cent of the time) in everyday speech even today like the Anglo-Saxon words do in the everyday speech of the English people.
In the Telugu states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh the mother tongue enthusiasts often mourn the invasion of English and fear that Telugu would soon disappear. However, what they do not seem to understand is that English and Telugu have both followed almost the same linguistic trajectories, faced similar threats of extinction, closely interacted with hegemonic languages, admitted innumerable words, compounds and even phrases from other languages and emerged as major languages of the world themselves with English enjoying the status of global language and occupying the 3rd place in terms of the number of native speakers and Telugu figuring, as stated already, at the 15th position. Just as English continues to add loanwords to its already very rich vocabulary from languages across the world even today Telugu now admits words from a readily available language, namely English, the way it did in the past from Sanskrit and several other dominant languages, and continues to grow as a result. The basic character of the Telugu language is unlikely to undergo a significant change no matter how many words it borrows from English; it did not happen when it borrowed thousands of Sanskrit words in the past! The English speaking peoples from New Zealand to the USA and beyond are proud of the presence of countless loanwords in their language. There is no reason why some Telugu speakers should object to the presence of English loanwords in their language. If they understand what their language is made up of, and the developmental phases it has gone through, they are very likely to change their opinion.
Phase-I: Proto-Dravidian
The story of Telugu begins in about 3000 BCE when the proto-Dravidian was born. Some 500 years later proto-Dravidian split into proto-North Dravidian, proto-Central Dravidian, proto-South-Central Dravidian and proto-South Dravidian. These branches of the proto-Dravidian further split into about 23 different dialects and eventually evolved into as many languages. Telugu emanated from proto-South-Central Dravidian, and perhaps became an independent language by 700 BCE (Krishnamurti 2003).
The bulk of everyday Telugu vocabulary today consists of the Dravidian words, and for common communication purposes, especially at lower levels of discourse, these are the words which figure in speech or writing about 80% of the time, thus inviting a comparison with Anglo-Saxon words which figure in English speech as frequently. Human body being the most immediate object in need of description, probably the first words in any language might have evolved in relation to it. I have therefore given here a select list of what may have been the first Telugu words, derived from proto-South-Central Dravidian, since they describe body parts: nuduru/nosalu, forehead; kannu, eye; mukku, nose; cevi, ear; pedavi, lip; nāluka, tongue; pandlu, teeth; jabba, shoulder; eda, heart/breast; vrélu, finger; gōru, nail; ara-céyi, palm; toda, thigh; kālu, leg; adugu, foot; kanda, muscle; emukalu/makkelu, bones; potta, belly; p(r)égu, entrails; odi, lap; kadupu, belly; tōlu, skin; naramu, nerve/tendon; and netturu, blood (Burrow & Emeneau, 1985).
A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, compiled by Burrow and Emeneau, lists only about 1500 such words, but from everyday experience of speaking Telugu and by applying the scholarly method of naturalistic observation it can be conjectured that the total number of Telugu words stemming from proto-Dravidian are at least a dozen times as many. For example, Andhra-Sanskrita Kosamu (Telugu to Sanskrit Dictionary) edited by Pullela Ramachandrudu and Kappagantula Lakshmana Sastri, lists more than 25,000* Telugu words that have emerged from proto-Dravidian and tadbhavas (Pali-Prakrit** words that joined Telugu lexicon in ancient past). These words have not undergone significant semantic, morphological or phonemic changes primarily because (1) Telugu, like all the other Dravidian tongues, demonstrated a tendency to retain proto-Dravidian roots at the beginning of the words and used only suffixes, and not prefixes or infixes, in constructing inflected forms, and (2) it rarely allowed the Indo-Aryan languages to influence it in structural terms — phonological or grammatical.
[* However, Kasi Krsnacaryulu’s Andhra Samskrta Nighantuvu (Telugu-Sanskrit Dictionary) lists only about 16,000 Telugu words of Dravidian origin.
** Prakrit is an umbrella term referring to any of the following languages: Pali, Sauraseni, Maharastri, Magadhi, Ardhamagadhi, Paisaci and Gandhari. Of these, Pali happens to be arguably the most important because of the prestige it enjoyed as the language of the Theravada Buddhist liturgy and literature. Ardhamagadhi often competed with Pali for eminence by virtue of its being the preferred language for writing down the Jain scriptures. Some scholars also regard Ardhamagadhi as the definitive form of Prakrit and the other languages of the group as its variants. As far as Telugu is concerned, it borrowed words primarily from Pali.]
Original Telugu words proceeding from proto-Dravidian, as noted above, were still very limited in number and obviously they might not have served communicative purposes over time. This necessitated borrowing words from the then classical languages — Pali-Prakrits and Sanskrit.
Phase-II: Pali-Prakrit Loanwords
The association of Telugu with Pali-Prakrits dates back all the way to proto-Dravidian. Pali-Prakrits started influencing Telugu in lexical terms even as it was branching off from proto-Dravidian. The presence of a number of Telugu words in the Maharastri Prakrit classic Gahasattasai (c. 200 CE) attributed to Hāla attests to the fact that Telugu interacted with Pali-Prakrits in ‘meaningful’ ways and benefited from the interaction. A few centuries later, but most definitely from the 6th century onwards, Telugu evolved into a literary language having adopted the Brahmi script. Occasional court poems and inscriptions in Telugu began to appear around this time. The first Telugu inscription is dated 575 AD and was discovered in the precincts of Chennakesava temple at Kalamalla village of Kadapa district. It is attributed to Renati Chola king Dhanunjaya Varma.
The literary use of the Telugu language, beginning in the 6th century, further necessitated the borrowing of Pali-Prakrit and Sanskrit words. Bh. Krishnamurti explains this process and the literary/historical reasons therefor in his monumental work The Dravidian Languages.
The loanwords found in classical texts are traditionally classified into two categories: tadbhava- (derived from Prakrits and not directly from Sanskrit; lit. ‘derived from that’) and tatsama- (unassimilated loanwords from Sanskrit; lit. ‘same as that’). The earlier stratum shows assimilated loanwords (tadbhava-) mostly taken from Pali and Prakrits and some directly from Sanskrit but with phonological changes that suit Dravidian. The spread of Jainism and Buddhism during the early centuries of the CE must have been responsible for the spread of learning Pali and Prakrits in the Dravidian south (Krishnamurti 472).