Nehru and Persian/Arabic

[Narayan S. Raja]

On Tue, 12 Jan 1999, N. Ganesan wrote:

>   When I was at Inst. of Asian studies on a visit, people told
> me this that Persian, Arabic are classified as classical
> languages, but not Tamil.
>
> I have to check where in one of the Central govt.
> documents. This is shown to UN etc., to get funds.


This is all too vague.  Get back to us
when you can be more specific.  You and
I are engineers, we should know how to
be specific.


> Hope Tamil is accepted, given protection, fostered
> with funds for its growth in India.

This is all bogus stuff.  Nobody is
holding down Tamil.  A language that
needs "protection" and "acceptance"
is a dying language.

A valuable step might be to convince
people in Tamil Nadu to speak/read more
Tamil and less English.  However,
this is very difficult (impossible)
to achieve.  It requires (horrors!)
actually writing cool stuff in Tamil.

It's easier to blame Hindi, North Indians,
central government, Sanskrit, Aryans,
the caste system, etc.  It won't help
in strengthening Tamil, but let's face it!
It feels good to be paranoid.

Regards,


Raja.