On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 4:27 AM, Radhika, Y. <[email protected]> wrote:
> English easily takes on the color and taste of other languages - a bit like > an avocado in a salad - bland on it's own and great with others. > That's why English flourishes and thrives and is becoming a world language...I think that there seems to be as many varieties of English as there are erstwhile colonies of the British Raj. Well, others also have prizes for orotundity (ha, ha!) and bad prose: http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/ and http://www.denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm We certainly have a culture of flowery prose in India in our own languages. I often have to wade through a flood of words in Tamizh, to get at the meaning....not to mention the fact that in many languages, the written and spoken forms are very, very different from each other. "pothro dArA nimontrONAr thruti morjonA koriben" is the literary Bengali form of "forgive the lapse of inviting you by letter", which still appears on most invitations. Urdu literature actually elevates floral prose or verse to a fine art and it is considered the height of "tehzeeb" to put across your meanining couched in the most ornate phrases. We cannot even ask for someone's name without adding a qualifier to it: "What is your good name?" (shubh nAm)...we are so worried that we might give someone a bad name! And there seems to be a complete schism between the SMS and "yeah" language that today's youngsters use, and the Elizabethan-to-Edwardian prose that they are taught, so badly, in schools, sorry, educational institutions. Deepa.
