The Mother On languages

Languages

To unite East and West, to give the best of one to the other and make a true synthesis, a university will be established for all kinds of studies. Our school will form a nucleus of that university.
In our school I have put French as the medium of instruction. One of the reasons is that French is the cultural language of the world. The children can learn the Indian languages at a later stage. If more stress is laid upon Indian languages at present, then the natural tendency of the Indian mind will be to fall back upon the ancient literature, culture and religion. You know very well that we realise the value of ancient Indian things, but we are here to create something new, to bring down something that will be quite fresh for the earth. In this endeavour, if your mind is tied down to the ancient things, then it will refuse to go forward. The study of the past has its place, but it must not hamper the work for the future.

Should French be considered as a special language, to bring the children into contact first with you and then with a certain vibration of beauty?

Something like that.
All I can say is that we are considered to be one of the best – perhaps the very best – school in India for teaching French and I think it would be a good thing to deserve this appreciation.
In my relations with the children here, I always speak to them in French.
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Why should science be taught in French?

There are many reasons of which the deeper ones you ought to know in your heart without needing to be told.
Among the exterior ones I can say that French, being a very precise language, is better for Science than English which is far superior for poetry.
There are also a few practical reasons among which is the fact, for all those who will have to earn their living when they are grown up, that all those who know French thoroughly well have most easily found employment.
Blessings.
9 February 1969

French is indeed the most precise and clearest language. But from the spiritual point of view it is not true that French is the best language to use; for English has a suppleness, a fluidity which French does not have, and this suppleness is indispensable for not deforming what is vaster and more comprehensive in the experience than what mental expression can formulate.
January 1950

(Concerning translation)

Bonté = Kindness and goodwill Bienveillance is to see the good side of everything. It is not mere optimism which closes its eyes from bad. It is rather a psychic vision which sees the Good everywhere.
There are many words which cannot be translated. Sri Aurobindo's humour and irony cannot be translated into French. English humour when translated into French sounds stupid and flat; French humour when translated into English becomes cruel
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and meaningless. These two languages seem to be so similar and yet their genius is quite apart.
4 July 1956
I shall send you the book [Prières et Méditations] tomorrow; but you must study grammar well if you want to understand what you read.
20 June 1932
Where should I learn good French style?

It is taught in advanced grammar courses, and there are also special books. One of the principal rules of style is that in a prose passage one should not use “I” except when it is absolutely impossible to avoid it, and in any case one should never begin two consecutive sentences with “I”. This gives you an idea of what you must do to give some style to your daily report!
20 July 1933
French must be written with simplicity and clarity.
29 September 1933
French gains by being written with simplicity and clarity; an accumulation of complicated images always renders the style pretentious.

My dear little smile,
You are absolutely right, and I don't see why, instead of reading interesting things, you should start doing boring exercises.
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To learn a language one must read, read, read – and talk as much as one can.
With all my love.
10 July 1935

I want to resume my study of French, particularly for speaking. Can I have some hints?

The best is to speak… courageously at every opportunity.

Mother, will You tell me the names of some good writers I could read?

If it is to learn French you should take a textbook of French literature to study and read one or two books by each author mentioned in the textbook, beginning at the beginning, that is, with the earliest authors.
22 September 1936

If You like, I will take one book that appeals to me and another from the earliest authors, as You advised me.

I did not say that you should read only the earliest authors; I said you should read one or two books by each author mentioned in the literature course, beginning with the earliest ones.
24 September 1936
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Mother, I have started to read French books – S has given me a list.

It is good that you read a lot of French, that will teach you how to write.
7 April 1969

Today I took class E5 and we continued the reading and explanation of Words of the Mother. Although I am constantly pointing to the beauty of the language with which Words is written, I am also conscious that I am putting more emphasis on the explanation than on the teaching of English.

It is quite all right because it obliges them to think in English which is the best way to learn a language.
2 May 1946

X has asked Your guidance in a difficulty concerning the education of his two young sons. He has put one of them in an Italian missionary school in Bombay where the medium of instruction is English and he also intends to put the other one in the same school shortly. But now, because of the current controversy about the language problem in India, he is feeling puzzled because he finds it difficult to decide whether it is good to give education to his children through the medium of English or whether it should be done through the mother tongue, i.e.
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The mother tongue is all right. But for those who want to do higher studies, the English is indispensable.
Blessings.
3 November 1967

At present many of our Higher Course students do not know sufficiently well any one language in which they could express their thoughts and feelings adequately and sensitively. Is this required or not, Mother? And if so, which language should they learn? Should it be a common or international language1 or their vernacular?

If only one language is known this is better.

From the point of utility some of our students do not want to learn classical Hindi.

Teach both, the true language and what it has become – that will be very interesting indeed – and more than anything else can cure them of the habit of speaking bad Hindi.

Do you want me to continue teaching Hindi in spite of the apathy of the students?

Continue without hesitation.…
Amrita says that the situation of his Tamil class is much

1Mother underlined these words and drew an arrow to them from her answer, thus indicating her preference.
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worse than that of the Hindi one. He says that he will continue even if the students come no more – he will teach to himself!
30 September 1959
Hindi is good only for those who belong to a Hindi-speaking province. Sanskrit is good for all Indians.

I have the deepest respect for Indian languages and continue to study Sanskrit when I have time.

The Sanskrit ought to be the national language of India.
Blessings.
19 April 1971

On certain issues where You and Sri Aurobindo have given direct answers, we (Sri Aurobindo's Action) are also specific, as for instance… on the language issue where You have said for the country that (1) the regional language should be the medium of instruction, (2) Sanskrit should be the national language, and (3) English should be the international language.
Are we correct in giving these replies to such questions?

Yes.
Blessings.
4 October 1971
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(Languages to be studied in Auroville)1

(1) Tamil
(2) French
(3) Simplified Sanskrit to replace Hindi as the language of India
(4) English as the international language.
15 December 1970
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The Roots Of Man's Language

WORD-FORMATION
from
Material for a full Philological Reconstruction ofthe old Aryabhasha from which the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages are derived.

Word Formation

THE language of man is not framed on earth, but in heaven, as indeed are all things that the earth-soul uses in this mortal journey. By the threefold energy of eternal truth, manifesting force and sustaining delight everything is created as a type in the world of ideas, the mahat of the ancients, in the principle of self-manifest and perfectly arranged knowledge, it is diversely developed by the more discursive but less sure-footed agencies of intellectual mind. Imagination hunts after new variations, memory and association corrupt, analogy perverts, sensation, emotion, pleasure seize violent and partial satisfaction. Hence, change, decay, death, rebirth, — the law of the world. All this takes place in the descent into the world of mind and the world of matter. Therefore mankind has one original language based on certain eternal types of sound, developed by certain laws of rhythmic variation, perfectly harmonious and symmetrical in its structure and evolution. This is the devabhāṣā and is spoken in the Satyayuga. Then it suffers change, detrition, collapse. Innumerable languages, dialects, vernaculars are born. The guardians of the sacred language attempt always to bring back the early purity, but even they cannot do it; they reconstruct it from time to time, compromise with the new tendencies, preserve something of the skeleton, lose the flesh, blood, sinew, much of the force and spirit. This reconstructed language they call Sanskrit; all else Prakrit.
The backbone of the skeleton is composed of the roots of the original language that survive; the rest is the various principles of word-formation. Accordingly in the languages of the world which are nearest to the old secret language, the ancient Aryan languages, there is one common element, the roots, the elemental word-formations from the roots and so much of the original significance as survives variety of mental development playing on different lines and to different purposes. The object of this treatise is to provide a reasoned basis, built up on the
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facts of the old languages, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German, Celtic, Tamil, Persian, Arabic, for a partial reconstruction, not of the original devabhāṣā, but of the latest forms commonly original to the variations in these languages. I shall take the four languages, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Tamil first, to build up my scheme and then support it by the four other tongues. I omit all argument and handling of possible objections, because the object of this work is suggestive and constructive only, not apologetic. When the whole scheme is stated and has been worked out on a more comprehensive scale than is possible in the limits I have here set myself, the time will come for debate. Over an uncompleted exegesis, it would be premature.
I shall first indicate the principle on which the roots of the devabhāṣā were formed. All Shabda (vāk) as it manifests out of the ākāśa by the force of mātariśvan, the great active and creative energy, and is put in its place in the flux of formed things (apas) carries with it certain definite significances (artha). These are determined by the elements through which it has passed. Śabda appears in the ākāśa, travels through vāyu, the second element in which sparśa is the vibration; by the vibrations of sparśa, it creates in tejas, the third element, certain forms, and so arrives into being with these three characteristics, first, certain contactual vibrations, secondly, a particular kind of tejas or force, thirdly, a particular form. These determine the bhāva or general sensation it creates in the mind and from that sensation develop its various precise meanings according to the form which it is used to create.
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SOURCE:SRI AUROBINDO HYMNS TO THE MYSTIC FIRE;CHAPTER 11;WORDS

origin of language(wikipedia)

mythical origins of language

origin of language

The Foundations Of the Psycological Theory

"My first contact with Vedic thought came indirectly while pursuing certain lines of self-development in the way of Indian Yoga, which, without my knowing it, were spontaneously con- verging towards the ancient and now unfrequented paths followed by our forefathers. At this time there began to arise in my mind an arrangement of symbolic names attached to certain psychological experiences which had begun to regularise themselves ; and among them there came the figures of three female energies, Ila, Saraswati, Sarama, representing severally three out of the four faculties of the intuitive reason, — revelation, inspiration and intuition. Two of these names were not well known to me as names of Vedic goddesses, but were connected rather with the current Hindu religion or with old Puranic legend, Saraswati, goddess of learning and Ila, mother of the Lunar dynasty. But Sarama was familiar enough. I was unable, however, to establish any connection between the figure that rose in my mind and the Vedic hound of heaven, who was associated in my memory with the Argive Helen and represented only an image of the physical Dawn entering in its pursuit of the vanished herds of Light into the cave of the Powers of darkness. When once the clue is found, the clue of the physical Light imaging the subjective, it is easy to see that the hound of heaven may be the intuition entering into the dark caverns of the subconscious mind to prepare the delivery and outflashing of the bright illuminations of knowledge which have there been imprisoned. But the clue was wanting and I was obliged to suppose an identity of name without any identity of the symbol.

It was my stay in Southern India which first seriously turned my thoughts to the Veda. Two observations that were forced on my mind gave a serious shock to my second-hand belief in the racial division between Northern Aryans and Southern Dravidians. The distinction had always rested for me on a supposed difference between the physical types of Aryan and Dravidian and a more definite incompatibility between the northern Sanskritic and the southern non-Sanskritic tongues. I knew indeed of the later theories which suppose that a single homogeneous race, Dravidian or Indo-Afghan, inhabits the Indian peninsula; but hitherto I had not attached much importance to these speculations. I could not, however, be long in Southern India without being impressed by the general recurrence of northern or "Aryan" types in the Tamil race. Wherever I turned, I seemed to recognise with a startling distinctness, not only among the Brahmins but in all castes and classes, the old familiar faces, features, figures of my friends of Maharashtra, Gujerat, Hindustan, even, though this similarity was less widely spread, of my own province Bengal. The impression I received was as if an army of all the tribes of the North had descended on the South and submerged any previous populations that may have occupied it. A general impression of a Southern type survived, but it was impossible to fix it rigidly while studying the physiognomy of individuals. And in the end I could not but perceive that whatever admixtures might have taken place, whatever regional differences might have been evolved, there remains, behind all variations, a unity of physical as well as of cultural type¹throughout India. For the rest, this is a conclusion to which ethnological speculation² itself has an increasing tendency.

But what then of the sharp distinction between Aryan and Dravidian races created by the philologists ? It disappears. If at all an Aryan invasion is admitted, we have either to suppose that it flooded India and determined the physical type of the

¹I prefer not to use the term race, for race is a thing much more obscure and difficult to determine than is usually imagined. In dealing with it the trenchant distinctions current in the popular mind are wholly out of place.
²Always supposing that ethnological speculations have at all any validity. The only firm basis of ethnology is the theory of the hereditary invariability of the human skull which is now being challenged. If it disappears, the whole science disappears with it.
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people, with whatever modifications, or that it was the incursion of small bands of a less civilised race who melted away into the original population. We have then to suppose that entering a vast peninsula occupied by a civilised people, builders of great cities, extensive traders, not without mental and spiritual culture, they were yet able to impose on them their own language, religion, ideas and manners. Such a miracle would be just possible if the invaders possessed a very highly organised language, a greater force of creative mind and a more dynamic religious form and spirit.

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