Likes and Dislikes in Science

[Narayan R.Joshi]

A humam vocal tract can produce approximately 50 to 52 distinct sounds.
These sounds are used in speech by many (if not all)languages of the
world.However many languages do not have enough letters(or graphemes)to
transcribe the sounds of their speech faithfully.Roman script used for many
European languages is one such example. Europeans have struggled over
centuries with their inadequate letters of alphabet that cannot transcribe
perfectly sounds of their languages. They have to remember spellings and
improvise different sounds for the same letters.The Initial Teaching
Alphabet(ITA) devised by Sir James Pitman for English has 44 characters, 24
of them are old standbys, 14 of them ligatures of standard characters and 6
completely new letters. Though the alphabet is longer, it is simpler in
that each character stands for a single sound and one sound only. The idea
to teach children to read and write a vastly easier orthography which, once
grasped, allows them to graduate to Standard English without too much of a
jolt on finding the combination of four letters O-U-G-H used in
words "though", "cough","through" and "thought" have different sounds. In
contrast NAgarI script has properties that other scripts try to emulate.It
has approximatelt 36 consonants and 16 (or 15) vowels. The same letter is
pronounced in the same way in almost all the time.THere is no need to
remember spellings because short and long vowels are incorporated in
pronunciation. The NAgarI script has capability to transcribe all sounds of
Sanskrit and other related Indian languages faithfully.In 1867 AD, Melville
Bell(the father of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of telephone)
published a book called "Visible Speech-The Science of Universal
Alphabetics". His "Visible Speech" was entirely different from what we
understand today as sonograph. Melville invented new symbols(or letters) to
which he called "Visible Speech".This was because his new symbols specified
the pronunciation of word sounds so accurately, that speech thus symbolized
could be repeated by anyone else familiar with the method.Melville perhaps
did not know that such system (phonetic orthographty of NAgarI script)was
in use from thousands of years in India. Or he knew but wanted to promote
his own originality and creativity which is good.Europeans struggling to
write Sanskrit words in their books with Roman letters often take help of
additional symbols(diacritical marks) but maintain their originality. On
the contrary in India, English is never written by using NAgaRI script
which is capable of doing that with very few diacritical marks for
sounds "a" in words like "bat", "cat" and "hat" etc.Would not that be
natural for Indians the way Roman script is for Europeans? Now in my
opinion having many scripts in India is an asset. If south Indian languages
were written with NAgarI script in addition to their own scripts (like Urdu
in NAgarI script and in modified Arabic), it will open new market and other
parts of India will be exposed to the pool of words from the south Indian
languages. It is the choice of the people- would one like to engage the
population in new creative endeavors or engage into arguments about the
birth of Urdu in the camp of the Turk of Gazni? Cultures that do not like
their own achievements and sacrifice originality for emulations of the
other cultures will simply end up one day as a footnote in the history of
the civilization of the world. Thanks.