ellanti

This is a hugely viral Indian song that got 15M+ hits on YouTube in just few days from release and the viewership is still growing.

It is short, simple, stupid but catchy and fun to watch and listen. First time, I could see my daughter happy and enjoying an Indian song.  It is popular all over india cutting across language and cultural barriers. 

What did Dhanush do to score a big hit like this?

The answer: he didn’t do anything that is not in vogue already.

Dhanush’s Language experiment

Dhanush used commonly spoken English words  in India (distance, moon, night, girl, glass, cow, love, …)  and   just suffixed u, lo, la to convert them into Tamil and be part of Tamil song with almost all words from English!

Dhanush didn’t try using their equivalent original Tamil words.  A vain  excercise, langauge watch guards in India have tried. They invented for example  doomasakatam  to mean train since it is a vehicle (sakatam) that releases smoke/steam( doom ).  We have electric trains nowadays that don’t smoke.  So what do we call them? 

Is there something wrong with Dhanush’s experiment? No. That is how kids and we all converse.

British way: export,import and expand

British English first exported itself to many parts of the world. Then it imported many words from other languages it came in touch with.  Likewise, each world language can borrow words that it comes in touch with.  

Didn’t know until recently that ‘bandicoot’ is based on ‘pandikukka’  word used in Telugu.  They just changed the word to smoothen little bit and vary the sound to suit heavy British accent. Yet another common example is the word   ’pajamas’  ( Hindi, variant of pāyjāma  < Persian pāy  leg + jāma  garment ). There are several examples like this.

Language doesn’t lose its identify if it borrows. It actually increases its reach and richness.

Language vs. Culture

Language is not culture. It is a means to experience the culture. Culture is not static and set in stone. It is dynamic. So language must continuously re-invent itself so it can be still a tool to experience the culture. To do so it must embrace as many words as are spoken and at least the main stream words for fuller experience of current time culture. Culture has past and present. Language must allow for experiencing both. So there is place for old words and new words.

Adding Suffixes to Sanskrit Words

Sanskrit scholars who lived in Andhra used to do Dhanush style experiment of adding suffixes to Sanskrit words to convert them into Telugu.    

Between 1100-1800 AD, many Sanskrit scholars living in Andhra, Karnataka and to some extend Tamilnaadu converted Mahabharat and other classical works from Sanskrit into Telugu as part of their copy exercise of classical works from Sanskrit into Kannada and Telugu. 

Scohlars involved in converting Sankrit words into Telugu formalized the rules for adding suffixes and gave technical name  to suffixes - Vibhaktis.  There are different categories of vibhaktis depending on whether the Sanskrit word is noun, adjective etc.

Summary: languages must adapt and tune with time and people to be successful like Dhanush’s tuned his lyrics to be in tune wiht the trend among youth.  Result: he scored a winner.

Some more thoughts relavent in this context : …