Musings: Beautiful Languages

We hear, talk, and even see languages all around us. We associate some with a strong tone - like German, and some with feminine softness - like French. We also find aesthetics in their structure, in their cultural backdrop, even their script. So what makes a language beautiful? Read on to find out my views on the matter.

I am going to stick to the Indian languages, just to throw some light on the minorities... A language's beauty does not lie on how easy it is to master, as even the true beauty of science cannot be seen by a layman. A language must convey a message in a clear and precise manner. It should be able to express every view point, and allow for even the most subtle differences.

As for giving genders to nouns, it is something that a language pulls from culture, much like its literature. Again, it owes to its beauty only if you understand the cultural quo of the place of origin. As i myself admit, I admire the way Hindi uses its gender deviation, but I get quite perplexed when the same occurs in French.

As far as beauty of a language is concerned, it arises from the way the sounds make us feel, whatever emotions they invoke amongst the listener. That is why spanish, Urdu, and even Pali are considered honey tongued languages. French on the other hand owes its status as the romantic language to its openly romantic culture, and has no relation to the language in itself.

As far as scripts go, within India, the devnagri script is the most common, and its beauty lies in the connectors. Each word is connected by a line : आप बहुत लम्बे हो. Amongst the languages that do not explicitly follow this script, bangla ( bengali) is the most similar to mandarin, scriptwise. Among dravidian languages, all languages follow a similar script, which are beautiful in themselves for their flow: மாலை வணக்கம்.

A language's true beauty can be only seen when you read it and see it express certain emotions common to all races. Say, love. English, being so global, has lost any one cultural root, and hence, also all of its abstract. Nowadays hardly any poet compares his love to Adam and Eve, or any of the greek gods. Now English is a very simple language where you compare a woman's gait to the evening breeze, because even seasons are different in every continent. Languages that are limited to a certain region have the advantage to pull from their culture, like Hindi. But the dravidian languages, the oldest languages to still exist, older than even latin, hold on dearly to their culture, and their script. Thses languages have even diverged into different forms. Tamil, for one, has three forms - spoken, which is colloquial, written - which draw heavily from the Hindu religion for the literature, and they have a poetic sense to them, and dramatic - This form is specially saved to the artists, and MUST be in poetic format.

When a language can express one emotion in a thousand ways, then it is an object of wonder, something more than just a way to communicate, a true beautiful piece of art. My vote, amongst Indian languages would go to Tamil, Bengali, and Urdu.

Urdu is the quintessential bastard language that made it big. Formed by the unholy matrimony between Hindi and Persian, it became the court language of the Moghuls, and hence had great leeway in a nation so big, that today, when even hindi has given way to a more diluted Hindustani, Urdu stands alone as India's answer to Romance. Its lineage aside, patronage given to it allowed the language to flourish as a language for poetry, for love and all the vices of the kings, and till date, an Urdu ghazal pulls the string of the heart even if one doesnt understand much of the wordings.