Hindi and English in Karnataka

[gail at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu]

> I don't know Kannada, and therefore do not know the Kannadan equivalent of
> the words "Power" and "Center," but I can not help but notice that Prof.
> Murthy's language activist organization, the Kannada Sakti Kendra has
> ironically borrowed Hindi words, for the name of the language movement
> (bhaasha andolan).  Perhaps the ubiquitous use of many of these Sanskrit
> derived words, found in Hindi and their cognates in many north Indian
> languages, along with the large scale borrowing of Sanskrit terms into
> several Dravidian languages, provides the commonality necessary to
> accommodate and communicate.
> 
> Yvette C. Rosser

I don't think borrowing from Hindi is really relevant, here -- that's 
something that always happens in multilingual situtations. I'd be *very* 
surprised if Kannada hadn't borrowed from Hindi, a language with 
which it has frequent contact, regardless of the power ratio or status 
of the two languages. Anyway, the Indic languages have also borrowed a 
lot from the Dravidian ones.

Gail