"It is as if it has never been..."

29th March 1995

Nostalgic Ruminations on a Sad Semantic Shift

[A Case Study in Diachronic Linguistics]

#memoriesfromdiaries

#HSCDays

#MCC School

Well, first and foremost, I heartily congratulate Dr. Shrimathy and her lovely team at Anna University for organizing an FDP on a very pertinent and engaging theme, titled, ‘Literature Teaching as Cultural Studies’.

My talk today was on Culturalism: 3.0 in Literature Teaching: Trajectories and Trends. I promised the lively participants that I would finish my Talk on time, as given to me in the schedule, and as promised, I wrapped up sharp at 12.29 pm. 😊

However, the participants had a lot of mind-blowing questions, which went on and on till around 1.15 pm, when one of the organisers Dr. Dipesh, [SSN University], gracefully brought the curtains down.

But still, students were all around even after the official ending of the programme, continuing the lively discussions with me – 😊 something that I really congratulate and appreciate about them! The curiosity, the zeal and the eagerness to learn something new, and to have their doubts dispelled is a laudable trait that I find so endearing in today’s researchers.

I spoke so proudly of our dear alumna – Maanini and her passionate involvement in her research – to all the spirited faculty and researchers who had gathered today. 👏 👏 👏

Going by indication, I personally sense a great deal of vibrancy amongst researchers of today, who are very sure and confident of what they are pursuing. Some of the themes that they are working on, so beautifully focus on ‘how best to make a difference to society through research’.

The twenty odd questions that came up for discussion [soon after the talk was over], were so awe-inspiring, that I so spontaneously commented that, some of the intriguing questions presented here, could even be part of a paper presentation or a dissertation. Such was the depth and the intensity of their questions.

And well, one point that I had made today, was about Semantic Drift or Semantic Shift, a key component of Historical Linguistics, or Diachronic Linguistics, which involves the study of language through time, either from the perspective of the present looking back to the ages and stages of the past, or from some earlier stage and age, towards the present.

Lyle Campbell’s highly engaging, hands-on guide to Historical Linguistics, titled, Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, is indeed a easy-breezy read on a very challenging area of study such as this, with numerous examples and practical exercises that help students to apply the principles and procedures by themselves, to know the ‘hows’ of ‘doing’ historical linguistics.

To Saussure, language was in essence, a system of signs - a social phenomenon - constructed by convention! Added, language is a structured [and structuring] system that can be viewed synchronically (as it exists at any particular time) and diachronically (as it changes in the course of time).

A fresh new perspective to the study of linguistics – called Structural Linguistics.

Well, this concept of the ‘Semantic Shift’ assumes a personal significance for me today, when I chanced upon my past diary entry for this very same day, more than a quarter century ago – on 29th March 1995, when our Warden Mr. Parthiban [Botany teacher as well], received a Telegram which was handed over to me by Mr. Jones, the clerk. The message in the telegram read thus – Sister gave birth to a girl child’.

Telegrams were, in those days, our only fastest and quickest modes of communicating important messages with our near and dear ones. Even our English text books had a complete unit that taught us how to write, short messages exclusively for Telegram.

I am even reminded of a joke that goes like this –

A son sends a telegram to his father from his hostel –

No money, no fun….

Your son 😉

Father’s telegram comes soon after, which says,

Too sad, very bad…

Your dad. 😉

Jokes apart, well, this set my mind pondering and wondering on the question – how soon hath time… yes! how soon hath time wrought such a huge impact on words!

It’s like, who woulda imagined that Bill Gates’s Business @ the Speed of Thought, written way back in 1999, could become a reality today, in such a short span of time?

Who woulda imagined…?

Today, the ‘Telegram’ services offered by the Post & Telegraph Offices all over India for well over 163 years, might have shut shop - the last telegram ever in India having been sent from the city of Nagpur on July 14, 2013, at 11:55 pm by one Ms. Kavitha, to her mother!

However, a new form of Telegram has taken deftly over, and quite adeptly at that, so much so that, the original (or earlier) meaning of the word ‘Telegram’ is nowhere to be found on the World wide web.

You just try keying in the word ‘Telegram’ on Google, and hey presto, you get the following results –

Telegram is a cloud-based instant messaging service, which offers multimedia messages, voice and video calls, similar to Facebook Messenger.

a screenshot of the page, today, 29th March 2023 at 8.30 pm

I would like to end this post with an intriguing excerpt from David Crystal’s highly interesting book titled, Language Death, where he quotes a very poignant example –

This time, 8th October 1992 is the critical day:

The West Caucasian language Ubuh ... died at daybreak, October 8th 1992, when the Last Speaker, Tevfik Esenç, passed away.

I happened to arrive in his village that very same day, without appointment, to interview this famous Last Speaker, only to learn that he had died just a couple of hours earlier.

He was buried later the same day. In actual fact, Kasabe and Ubykh (a widely used alternative spelling) had effectively died long before Bogon and Tevfik Esenç passed away.

If you are the last speaker of a language, your language – viewed as a tool of communication – is already dead.

For a language is really alive only as long as there is someone to speak it to.

When you are the only one left, your knowledge of your language is like a repository, or archive, of your people’s spoken linguistic past.

If the language has never been written down, or recorded on tape – and there are still many which have not – it is all there is.

But, unlike the normal idea of an archive, which continues to exist long after the archivist is dead, the moment the last speaker of an unwritten or unrecorded language dies, the archive disappears for ever.

I repeat,

…the archive disappears for ever! 🙁

And so, when a language dies which has never been recorded in some way, it is as if it has never been.

I repeat,

… it is as if it has never been! 🙁

How true it proves for the sad semantic shift in the good ol’ Telegram of our times past!  ❤️