Thursday, August 06, 2009

Telugu bloggers

For me it is a late realization that Telugu is a beautiful language. I used to fail in both Telugu and English in school, was fascinated by mathematics around the age of 16 or so and did not look back. But during the last few years, I started remembering songs which I heard as a child and started to read a bit more. As Charles Brown says in his Preface to Verses of Vemana:
"It is peculiarly smooth and elegant in its sound, and the poets have cautiously preserved its euphony. Hence Europeans have called it the Italian of India. The student may at first think this remark, which is no new one, unfounded; as the pronunciation is strong and decided; and as the mixture of Sanscrit terms often gives it a degree of roughness. But the pure rustic dialect as well as that of the poets is altogether different from this colloquial language; in the pure dialect most of those Sanscrit words that had harsh sounds are softened till they are as smooth and melodious as pure Telugu."

Later it seemed to be English words not all of which were softened in Telugu and Telugu as it was spoken a few years ago did not seem really suitable for expressing difficult thoughts in science and philosophy. I thought that a first step might be to make dictionaries of Telugu words both old and currently used available online. Since these pessimistic thoughts occured to me there has been an explosion of bloggers writing on difficult topics from science to philosophy, creating dictionaries online like తెలుగుపదం, making some dictionaries available online శ్రీ శోధన ప్లగ్‌ఇన్ and many more (some mentioned here and other posts in my blog). As I get to know more, I will post more links. The future of Telugu does not seem as bleak as it did five years ago.

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