Correia is due forgiveness for he (predictably) knows not what he talks/writes about. One wonders whether he has lived in Goa and/or attended S-Konkani church services or sat through S-Konkani sermons.....or read the S-konkani books used in the Goa schools. Such research is normally expected of real journalists. But alas!
I also recommend that he purchases and reads Prof Alok Rai's "Hindi Nationalism". That just might tell him a thing or two about "imposter" languages. It might help also him (possibly) understand why the "S-Hindi" and "P-Urdu" are now suffering ...and giving way to English in India and Pakistan respectively; just as this imposed and artificially conceived S-Konkani (i.e. a horribly nasal sounding dialect of Marathi) has given way to English. The comment about 'ex-priests' is possibly one Correia is not expected to comprehend. Here is a snippet from a review of Prof Alok Rai's "Hindi Nationalism" http://www.cpiml.org/liberation/year_2002/september/book%20review.htm (there are others available on Google - which I assume - real journalists will research before writing again) "One way out of this dilemma he suggests is to adhere to the goal of democratic and participative citizenship ..................... and not the same old Sanskritised ‘Hindi’ of the upper-caste, urban elites. The needs of communication between different regions he avers will ensure, in the longer term, the emergence of some common language that could be ‘something like Hindi’. But this process cannot even begin till the imposter Advani’s ‘Hindi’ stands in the way! " Hope the above mentioned book will enlighten those who decide to remove their blinkers. As it stands today ...it can be stated that 'but this process cannot even begin till the imposter Borges' ‘Konkani’ stands in the way!' I'd also say this: To someone (like me) who speaks Puneri Marathi (fluently) - and can read and write it, this alleged Konkani (that these chaps have been peddling) is guaranteed to provoke emesis. Yuck! jc == 2009/5/21 Eugene Correia <[email protected]> Jose Colaco's remark that the Devnagiri script is an "imposter" is whacky. It is as irrevelant as his remark about "ex-priests." Konkani experts such as the late Prof. Lourdino Rodrigues and late Fr. Mathew Almeida, to mention just but two, agreed that Devnagiri captures the sounds of the Konkani language better than Roman script. When speaking, the Devnagiri-script Konkani sounds indeed like Marathi but it is because it has "loan words" or modified words from SANSKRIT. There are indeed the "new Konkani" and is also included largely in the liturgy which, in the olden days, had more "loan words" from the Portuguese. Igreza or Igorz is now dev-mondir.
