A Linguistic Factor in Tamil

A LINGUISTIC FACTOR
IN TAMIL CHARACTEROLOGY

The eminent psychologist Ernest Jones, in his essay A Linguistic Factor in English Characterology has pointed out that (in his words) the development of the outstanding English character trait of propriety, commented on by practically all foreign observers, has been fostered by the peculiar nature of the English language. Much, indeed all, of what he says in the elucidation of his thesis, is applicable to the Tamil language.

Ernest Jones remarks, “The difference in being invited to a dish of veal and pork and one of calves’ flesh and swine flesh is very perceptible.” This was brought out long ago by Sir Walter Scott with a mixture of satire and humour in his novel Ivanhoe, the action of which is placed in the reign of King Richard I, when the two main races of England - the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans - were still hostile to each other and not united by a common language. In the opening scene of the novel the conversation between two swineherds runs as follows:

“Truly,” said Wamba,” ... leave the herd to their destiny which, whether they meet with bands of travelling soldiers or of outlaws or of wandering pilgrims, can be little else than to be converted into Normans before morning, to thy no small ease and comfort.”

“The swines turned to Normans to my confort!” quoth Gurth. “Expound that to me, Wamba, for my brain is too dull and my mind too vexed to read riddles.”

“Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about on their four legs?” demanded Wamba.

“Swine, fool, swine,” said the herd. “Every fool knows that.”

“And swine is good Saxon,” said the jester. “But how call you the sow when she is flayed and drawn and quartered and hung up by the heels like a traitor?”

“Pork,” answered the swine-herd.

“I am very glad every fool knows that too,” said Wamba, “and pork, I think, is good Norman French. And so, when the brute lives and is in charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name, but becomes a Norman and is called pork, when she is carried to the castle-hall to feast among the nobles. What does thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?”

Words are symbols and are understood by a process of learning through association of spontaneous visualization or other means of sensory realization with the objects or qualities for which they stand. During this process they are charged with psychic energy in the sense that they are directly related to the learner’s emotional and intellectual experiences, and can readily evoke such response in him on recall, conscious or subconscious. What applies to the individual naturally applies also, extended and collectively, to the people who are a composite of individuals. This investment of feelings with psychic energy Freud called “libidinization”. Sir James Frazer has brought out that to the primitive man the symbol is often more real than to the civilized man. The savage practises magic not only through a man’s hair, nail or parts of the body, but also through his name. Words, thus born primarily evocatively, later tend to become in varying degrees, shorn of their original charge, until they culminate finally in the last achievement of the human mind, namely abstract thought.

The more close or immediate the association of words with reality, the more do they come home to the people, bosom’s in the nakedness of reality and with the force of reality. This nakedness and force may be attenuated by holding the words, and thus their ideadtion, at a distance, so to say, from the speaker or listener by clothing them in an unfamiliar garb, that is a foreign language.

Ernest Jones says:

If it is unusually easy to give vocal expression to forbidden ideas in a way that inhibits the development of feeling, it seems to me to follow that in such circumstances the feeling will be more readily and extensively inhibited. Now it is clear that this is just the situation in which the English race has been placed for nearly a thousand years. The Saxon and Norman languages, after living side by side for about two centuries, gradually coalesced to form English, but to this day there is in most cases an obvious difference in the “feel” of the words belonging to each, and still more between the words of Saxon origin and Latin words more recently introduced than their Norman-­French precursors. All literary men recognize the distinction clearly, and students are urged to choose Saxon words wher­ever possible because of their capacity to arouse plastic im­ages and feeling-tone. Our store of synonyms is unequalled by that of any other European language**; and the difference in the respects I have mentioned between such pairs as house and domicile, fatherly and paternal, book and volume are quite patent. The difference in being invited to a dish to veal or pork and one of calves’ flesh and swine flesh is very perceptible. No other nation is unable to use its native word for belly if need be, but we have to say “abdomen” and that only with circumscrip­tion. In English the lady is gravid, pregnant or enceinte, there being no single native word to describe the phenomenon. The process in question can often be followed in stages, such as when the Saxon word “gut” gets replaced first by the Norman­-French “bowel”, and then, when this is found too coarse, by the Latin “intestine”.

The working of this phenomenon in literary men is exemplified in the case of Johnson, of whom Professor Henry Gifford has observed that he wrote Latin poems all through his life, sometimes to express feelings which would have looked raw and naked in English, and that by setting personal anxieties and fears in the frame of classical reference, he could acknowledge and control them.

The situation in Tamil is analogous to that in English. In the place of the Norman language, and subsequently Latin, coalescing with the native Saxon we have, in similar chronological order, Sanskrit and English coalescing with Tamil to produce a richness and flexibility of its vocabulary which, one may presume from the fact of this mixing, is probably unequalled by any other Indian language. For almost every word we have synonyms derived from Tamil and Sanskrit. They possess different feeling-tones: those from Tamil being simple, racy and saucy, short and often monosyllabic or repetitive, crisp and vigor­ous, evocative and intimate; those from Sanskrit being often long, rolling and ornate, at one remove from the self, reverberating with the power of incantation; each of the pair with its own associations, nuances and ranges of feeling.

The influence on the people of the words from two different languages has been similar to that of the bilingually derived English words on the English people. In daily speech we find the Tamils often using Sanskrit or English words in expressions of intimacy, raw feelings and physiological functions. Probably no other people use a foreign word for “love” as frequently as we find the Tamil people of today using the English word for it, or less commonly the Sanskrit word, instead of the pure Tamil. They even fight shy of using their own words, and prefer using English words for husband, wife and mistress. “Aambadayaal” (a colloquialism for “ahamudaiyaal”) in Tamil for “wife” sounds too intimate or coarse sometimes, “bharyai” (the Sanskrit word “bharya” Tamilised) too pedantic, “manaivi” in good Tamil stilted. The words “wife” or “Mrs.” in English often come natural to the Tamilian, or less often, the word “samsaaram” derived from Sanskrit. This habit of holding feelings at one remove extends to expressions of physiological functions of excretion and reproduction. The Tamil word for “faeces” is unthinkable, and people use the word “malam”, derived from Sanskrit, or “stools” in English. In general, for whatever offends “good breeding” or decorum the Tamilian uses Sanskrit or English words instead of the Tamil.

As Ernest Jones has truly remarked, the English character has been characterized by foreign observers as marked by a sense of propriety. Propriety is a minor form of inhibition. In the Tamils the inhibition has become even more extreme, often of gripping severity. While this leads to frustration in the individual, this has not been without advantage to the Tamil people. Civilization is based ultimately on inhibition. Easy access to inhibitory factors and their insiduous operation through their language may have been conducive to the promotion of cerebration in the Tamil people and to the qualities of precision and crispness in Tamil speech, humour and literature.

* From ‘Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis: Volume I, Miscellaneous Essays’ by Ernest Jones. Pub. The Hogarth Press Ltd., London.

** Cf. G.H. Vallins: “Our vocabulary, gathered from so many sources, is unusually rich.” (G.H. Vallins’s The Best English, p. 26, Pub. Pan Books Ltd., London, 1960)