Linguistic bling

They departed for the heavenly abode. Or more simply, they died…

Years ago, when one didn’t need to be so alert to personal safety, my father and I would discuss interesting things while driving around Karachi. I told him once of a theory I had which to me explained if not excused the suffering in life. It was that each person was the only real being to exist in his world, the rest existed only in his mind; and so there were as many worlds as individuals alive. For why, after all, should a person suffer because of another? But my father said this was a dangerous theory, one already in existence, called ‘solipsism’ and was not the best theory to subscribe to.

I was a bit peeved that what I had imagined to be a brilliant idea of my own was not, after all, original.

It was rather annoying therefore to find that another pet theory of mine already existed and has a name and all. Not that I was surprised this time, it must have occurred to many people. Called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it is associated mostly with the writings of a certain Benjamin Lee Whorf (not to be confused with the Klingon of Star Trek fame), and his mentor Edward Sapir.

Benjamin L Whorf was a linguist and, incongruously, a fire prevention engineer while Sapir was an anthropologist and a linguist. There are two versions of their hypothesis, one less absolute than the other. The more absolute version says that all men are totally a product of the language they speak. The milder and today more acceptable version says that the words people use and the concepts behind the language they speak help shape them to some extent. It studies the ways in which language and culture influence each other, the relationship between linguistic differences, and the differing world view of people speaking different languages.

Keeping that in mind: on the news not a day goes by without someone or several people unfortunately becoming ‘luqma-e-ajal’. Translated, that means that they became ‘morsels of food for death.’ This could be expressed more simply in Urdu by saying that: (woh) mar gaye (they died).

And so people become ‘athishi ka shikar’, or ‘apnay khaliq-e-haqeeqi say ja milay’, which means that they ‘became victims of fire’, or ‘joined their True Maker’, which could be more simply expressed once again in Urdu as ‘jal gaye’, or the ubiquitous ‘mar gaye.’

(I keep giving the example of dying, I know, but it tends to happen so often here).

So a wife, sister, father, or mother are not beewi, behen, baap, or maa respectively, but a shareek-e-hayaat (partner in life), a humsheera (person who has fed by the same mother), walid-e-muhtarram (respected father) or walida majda (respected mother), and let’s not forget the ‘piece of a person’s liver’ or a lakht-e-jigar… beta or beti in simple Urdu, in English ‘son’ or ‘daughter’.

If this isn’t a feast for Whorf and Sapir I don’t know what is.

What do these florid terms, in daily use even by the press, say about us as a people?

The first undoubtedly is that as a society we are inclined to be respectful, bordering on obsequious.

Could the second be that we are emotional, bordering on irrational?

One would expect the media to have certain guidelines regarding the language used in the delivery of news. People are dying in droves all over the country, today in Karachi, tomorrow in Peshawar, the day after somewhere else, not due to old age but because they are shot at, blown to bits or drowned as a result of flooding that could have been prevented. Bringing in eternity or the Maker into reporting such events on the national news suggests an element of inevitability, or transference of guilt from those who should be held responsible to an irrevocable fate, not to mention that it fudges the issue at hand. A blunt ‘mar gaye’ is all that is required. It calls for investigation into the matter, a search for the earthly reasons behind such temporal tragedies. After all why does the stark reality of such deaths need to be surrounded by this linguistic bling?

Emotional terminology promotes religious and political clichés. These clichés are successfully used by haranguers to sway emotions and opinions to irrational conclusions. Small wonder then these haranguers are brought into roles of authority and are seldom questioned when they abuse their positions.