It is amazing to know that there is a very notable difference in terms of the basic language structure between the languages followed in Western countries( such as English, French , Greek , Spanish, German, Polish & Russian etc ) and those followed in many of the Asian countries (such as Hindi ,Japanese , Nepali , Burmese ,Sanskrit ,Tibetan ,Korean , Turkish & Urdu etc) . Although , there are few flexibilities and exceptions which exist with almost every language on earth , but the basic structure more or less remains the same . The framework which has been explained below will clarify many of your doubts and will make you understand that why it is easier for a person who is in India (Asian country ) to learn Japanese than the one who is from any western country . One important point to remember is that, when it comes to learning a foreign language , people tend to speak any language that they are newly learning in the framework followed in their own mother tongue .So it is important to know about the distinct frame work between languages which have a different origin .
The frame work here refers to the sentence structure with special emphasis on Subject ,Object , Verb . Subject is the person about whom the sentence is about ,Object gets related to the subject in that sentence & Verb is the word which explains the activity/work being carried out .
Here is an example of an English sentence :
Tom is eating an apple .
In this sentence Tom is the subject because it is the name of the person who is involved in the activity , ‘is eating’ links to the verb & ‘Apple’ is the object of this sentence. For simplicity of naming here , lets denote Subject as ‘S’, Verb as ‘V’ & Object as ‘O’ , then we can form that the structure for the above given sentence or any other English sentence becomes : S-V-O .
Many of the Asian languages have the structure of a sentence of the form S-O-V . This is where the main difference comes when it comes to learning foreign languages or understanding them especially in a case when a person from an Asian country frames an English sentence of the form S-O-V (different from the actual English form S-V-O) and creates confusion while communicating with a person who has English as the mother tongue . These confusions sometimes lead to unjust understanding and so it is important to know more about the framework of global languages . Lets have the same (above discussed) sentence with the same meaning in Hindi & Japanese and see how sentence structure varies :
In Hindi the sentence becomes :
Tom seb kha raha hai . ( Tom is the subject(S) , ‘seb’ means apple that is the object(O) & ‘ kha raha hai’ means ‘is eating’ that is the present continuous form of the verb(V) ie: kha meaning ‘ to eat’).
In Japanese language the same sentence becomes :
Tom san wa ringo o tabete imasu ( Tom is the subject(S) , 'san' is always added after the name for giving respect to the person , 'ringo' means apple that is the object(O) & ‘tabete imasu’ means ‘is eating’ that is the present continuous form of the verb(V) ie: 'taberu' meaning ‘ to eat’) .
It can be seen from the above sentences that the arrangement of S,O and V for the same meaning is different for different languages ie: For English it is ‘S-V-O’ but for Hindi & Japanese it is “S-O-V” .
Thus , the sentences from languages in western countries which have words of Latin or Greek origin have the form S-V-O . It is really awesome to appreciate the beauty of languages that many of the Western languages have number of words of Latin origin and these languages have S-V-O structure but Classical Latin language has S-O-V structure . We may have to do a lot of reading to know why it is so but one this worth praising for languages is that they have evolved a long way from thousands of years of human involvement with them . So when it comes to learning of some of the major Asian languages such as Japanese or Hindi ,the people following S-V-O structure of language will have to modify the S,V,O arrangement to make it of the form origin(S-O-V) . For doing this the brain has to put lot of efforts because the mother tongue is the language which comes with instinct and it the language in which the brain has been thinking for years based on many years of training since birth due to the environment provided to us by our parents , teachers and society . Believe it or not , every single thought that comes to our mind at every point of time & even in our dreams is in a language which is always our mother tongue that we use to communicate with ourselves especially in important times of our life involving feelings of joy ,love or fear etc .
Some of the major languages which follow S-V-O sentence structure are :
Albanian, Bulgarian, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Italian, Ganda, German ,Greek, Hausa, Hebrew, Javanese, Kashmiri, Khmer, Latvian, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Quiche, Rotuman, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, Vietnamese, Arabic, Chinese and Yoruba
Some of the major languages which follow S-O-V sentence structure are :
Ainu, Amharic, Armenian, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Basque, Bengali, Burmese, Ancient Greek, Hindi, Hittite, Hopi, Hungarian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Kurdish, Classical Latin, Manchu, Marathi, Mongolian, Navajo, Nepali, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Quechua, Sanskrit, Seri, Sicilian, Sindhi, Sinhalese and most other Indo-Iranian languages, Somali and virtually all other Cushitic languages, Sumerian, Tibetan and nearly all other Tibeto-Burman languages, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and all other Dravidian languages, Tigrinya, Turkic languages, Turkish, Urdu, and virtually all Caucasian languages
The reason for India as one of those countries which have people with the flexibility to smoothly adapt to the grammer of various foreign languages and comfortably learn them :
India is a very big country with population around 1.2 Billion and you can see people following almost all the major religions of the world . There are 28 states & 7 union territories and it is really interesting to see that almost every state has its own language . There are 33 regional languages recognized in India out of which many have diversified scripts (written form) totally different from one another. Out of these languages 22 have the status of official languages and have around 2000 different dialects linked to them . Hindi is the national language and English is the official language for administrative purposes & for imparting education on various important fields of study all over the country . It is because of a big number of languages that “3 language formula” is very much popular in India which mentions that Hindi is the national language followed by most of the people, English is the language for administrative purposes and the regional languages as the one which get used for all social interactions within any state . The fact that Indians can learn a new language little more faster is because of two most significant reasons which are given below :
è 1) Almost all of the Indian languages follow S-O-V structure (Kashmiri is an exception) and English is also a very much popular language because higher education in India is in English that has S-V-O structure(as discussed in above paragraphs ) .Because both of the structures are so much popular in India it becomes easy for an Indian person to understand the structure of global languages and learn them with ease . For example : When I was learning basic Japanese conversation , I knew that the sentence structure in Japanese is same as in Hindi , so whatever I could think in Hindi(my mother tongue) I was readily able to frame the sentence in Japanese once I learned basic vocabulary .With no extra efforts , I could frame Japanese sentences because what happens in this scenario is that the sentence structure (S-O-V : which is same as of my mother tongue'Hindi') comes from instinct and I just need to put words in that structure to complete the full sentence .This really works and you can try this on any language of the world that you want to learn after you know the sentence structure .
è 2) Because there are 33 different regional languages in India , it can always be expected with high probability that every person follows at least 3 to 4 regional languages with ease .This happens because he/she has to interact with people from other states where they migrate for jobs or for their business networking . These regional languages have their distinct accents & pronunciations and being able to follow more than one regional language makes a person to promote extra flexibility to his tongue and be able to adapt to accents of various other languages by putting less efforts.
Conclusion : It is always beneficial to give prime focus to various languages which exist on earth. If we do so then we can better understand the framework of those languages and which in turn facilitates us to more clearly understand conversations in English language (a globally very popular business language) with someone who does not have the sentence structure (S-V-O) of English matching with his/her mother tongue .Giving special focus on global languages and their framework makes us a more productive communicator and shows global mindset with distinct ability to understand people’s perspectives to the best possible extent . Moreover , many globally recognized researches have proved that trying to learn and follow more languages improves cognitive skills and even does essential shielding against dementia in old age.
Written by :
Devesh Sharma
devesh0102@gmail.com
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