Presidential Address – Prof. Udaya Narayana Singh

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Well friends, let me in the beginning go to an anecdote about one of the discomfort that I have had when Prof. Kelkar was interviewing for a position in Delhi University . Obviously it was meant for Prof. Gurubaksh Singh, who was the Vice-chancellor he looked at my CV and said that ‘It looks like you've traveled from Ladakhi Phonology to Bangla syntax and Maithili and I also see that some of this work is in Assamese and Oriya and Telugu. And I also see that you've left linguistics and gone into literature and culture and translation. It looks like you've probably from one to the other place because you're not comfortable with anyone of those, is that the case?' So in the question that he asked I had hint as well as a question and accordingly I thought that maybe I can think about the answer from his own life because he's talked about the lamentation that he's had that people quite often do not go from one place to the other place, one space to the other space, one language family to the other language family. So I hope this message would be taken positively by the new generation of linguists. And as if to enthuse the new generation of linguistics and linguists, we have what is an open collected essays and studies written and edited by Ashok R. Kelkar, some of us have seen his new book in Hindi, ‘Triveni', which is on language literature and culture. Truly speaking the book that is here tells you that here is a linguist who travels from one space to the other with ease and without any discomfort. And this paper, what you can see her on the screen is a new e-book. We have our e-book site called www.ciilebooks.net . This is accessible from all of our sites and if you just go to www.ciil.org , you have an icon for e-books. You can hook up to the e-books site and there are a large number of e-books already available there. This we are doing because we would like to have it in the public domain and this is not the end, this is the beginning because this is Kelkar's e-book but we would like to have similar e-books by other scholars. Those of you who wish to give us the permission to collect your stuff and make it available to the generations of students scattered all over the world working on south Asian Linguistics. So I'm very happy to click on this and browse through this for a few minutes. I'm doing it online as you can see; this is the book- how it looks like, and if you click on the book it takes you to a page which shows the earlier Kelkar and you have his profile here and you can go on looking at it to find what he has done. It was a revelation for me to know that he has had so much of training and so much of education behind what he has done. And then of course you can go to his preface, look at what he has to say about this particular book or you can go into the main book which has these sections about A – I on language and linguistics. If you click one any one of them, then you have so many articles appearing, if you go to any one of this, you can do it leisurely. In fact he himself was surprised, this whole idea came up in a discussion with him in his house just a few months ago and he said ‘how is it possible to do it within few months.' So he didn't realize that he has done these 117 papers with 2500 pages which can be done in few months and put on. This is quite an achievement, I would say, for the people who have done it. So you have so many sections if you just go on clicking each one, it's a huge site. So this is one the few book sites, so I don't have to speak much about it, more will be clearer as you can personally sit down anywhere, anytime and look at this particular website. I have written a small foreword to it where I've mentioned that Prof. Kelkar continues the tradition of Isaac Talpurwala, Sunit Kumar Chatterjee, T. P. M. and S M Katre and these are people who had a distinguished career and made significant contribution to South Asian linguistics. And I'm very happy that in some ways this is a small token of repayment from the institution which he has been instrumental in building with several other people and I'm very happy that this has happened today and he's present here when we're doing this. Now coming to my own intervention on the Emaneau conference, I had the good fortune to spend an evening with Prof. Emaneau, had dinner with him back in 1978 and it was a wonderful experience. And that was the time when I was discovering several other people like; almost everyday we had either dinner or lunch with Ferguson and George Cardona. So some of the greats of South Asian linguistics were available and as a research student completing his PhD, it was a wonderful experience for me to be able to be with them. And about what we're doing today, just few weeks ago I had an e-mail from James Mattisoff who said that I've told Prof. Emaneau about the event that is happening, he was very happy and I took him out for dinner in a restaurant, we had a nice time together in the evening. So it looks like he's very hale and hearty and we wish him more productive years and this is only a mark of respect from us for the scholar. Somebody asked me ‘Why Emaneau? Why not somebody else? Well, Emaneau is a kind of symbol for us and it is very essential that we re-look at the entire concept for which Emaneau stood for, which Emaneau has made his mark. And one of the important things that he's contributed to South Asian languages and linguistics is what is known as ‘language area hypothesis' and I was just looking at the entire language area hypothesis and the consequences of what we have. Now this audience I don't need to talk about India as a linguistic area, what kind of contributions made by Emaneau. Many scholars have worked on it, Nick Messika has worked on it, Subbarao, sitting here, has worked enormously, Anvitabji from JNU has done, several people have worked on this area. In many works where we see that the linguistics area is an infamously messy thing, with notoriously fuzzy picture that emerges from the ground realities. And ever since Trubetskoy has talked about the concept of something which was the basis of language area, linguistic area, we found several difficulties which have been fore-grounded by the later scholars. One of them is Sarah and she gives you, Thomason gives you, a couple of points here. 1) Of course this is a text book but a very important text book for the students says that ‘It is difficult to decide whether a particular region constitutes a linguistics area or not ‘, It is not a very easy claim one can make but it's not easy to prove definitely that it is a linguistic area or it is not. And in spite of a long tradition of working on the concept of linguistic area, there is no agreement among the scholars, no definite agreement that this is the definition of the linguistic area concept. And even if you look at the most widely known language area, the Balkan area, for instance, it is one of basis of an initial day language area hypothesis, it's very difficult.. in fact Lyle Campbell has a very nice article, very detailed article on this close scrutiny of the linguistics area concept. Those of you who're interested can look into the website of Campbell and find out what exactly he has to say. And there other problems too, for instance, about the south Asian linguistics area, the Zurich University project tells us something which is very interesting and Albert and Newcomb pointed that many of these features that we say is the feature of south Asian linguistics area are also found in Turkish, Mongolian languages of central Asia. So what do we do? Because this kind of statement we also find partly in some places defining south Asia as a linguistics area, but some of the isoglosses, we could say, that goes beyond India and some part of central Asia will have to be included into it. So how do we define or redefine that concept? Similarly they also point out; they seldom spread to Munda and Tibeto-Burman language of South Asia . Not many of them, not much is really included into this in terms of the features. It's a fact that many smaller languages of the area hold a very important clue to the phenomenon but many, many of the smaller languages of South asia have not yet been studies. So as many of these languages have been focused now by different linguistic departments, different linguistics, different institutions, we are started to see many of the new facts, it's like the discovery of these Brazilian languages, Subbarao and Hock may remember in 1978, the 1 st sala we had, LSA meeting, I believe, Pallani and Derbyshire brought out the verb initial languages and that was a mind boggling thing. We thought until that point of time that subjects must always be in the beginning part somewhere before the objects. At the most, if it is verb initial, it has to be VSO, it cannot be VOS. But the things are changing, and with this new languages coming into the picture, things may happen. There seems to be also a sharp dividing line around the 84 th meridian and you have languages of the East, the Westshowing very different kinds of tendencies and that explains some of the points. This convergence project in the U.K., for example, which are being worked out on several languages by E R Marhtras and Sackel and Truman, there also we have very interesting questions emerging on the language area concept, for instance, the some of the questions are asked some of the language functions specifically prone to convergence in linguistic areas that some other kinds of language functions. What is the relationship between structural borrowing and convergence? How do borrowing hierarchies relate to hierarchies of convergence? How theoretical notions of convergence can accommodate both shared typological features and features that emerge because of strategies of bilingual speech. Of course, we had a very profitable discussion of socio-linguistics, the new agenda of socio- linguistics in the last 5 days in this institution and at that point of time we have noticed and were emerged as a general consensus emerges, and doing socio-linguistics in the South Asian or any other situation is not really doing linguistics very differently. There has to be the rigors, there has to be the kind of a merger of the two rather than a divide of the two. And therefore many of the points should come up from bilingualism and various other notions. We know about the genesis of the concept of the linguistic area, I don't think I need to say much about it. But those of us who know about Franz Boas' contribution, for those of you who haven't seen Boas' picture, it's on the screen. He talked about the acculturation and absorption between what was inherited and what was defused and that is the important point of the beginning of the areal typological approach and he compared the structural traits of language of a particular region with their neighbors to decide whether there has been a possible diffusion and this is what has kindled the imagination of Prince Trubetskoy and in his own way then the Brasch school people, particularly, Trubetskoy came up with the language union concept. There is a fancy German name which I can't pronounce, my friends here are very proficient in the language, they can find out. But essentially his idea was whether this congruence features a particular congruence is determined by common origin which is the genetic explanation or by a prolonged proximity in time and this is very important but that in none of these cases we're talking about space in a very significant manner. Trubetskoy talked about the 2 concept of Sprachbruch and Sprachund and he also gave us the details of how the similarities with respect to syntax or morphological principle or common culture worlds or phonological inventories can tell us what is kind of language area. But there are arguments against morphological borrowing which have been given by Prof. Rajendra Singh during last fe days in course of discussion. So these points need to be discussed, we shouldn't really take them for granted that the old cases that have been so far proposed are exactly the examples of the kind that we would take for granted and as for syntax, it's difficult to push beyond a point, a certain limit, that earlier texts and inscriptions are very, very highly inadequate corpus to decide definitely whether this I a case of convergence or not a case of convergence. There are many, many claims that people make, for example, there is this claim about American NWC being as weak area, I'm not sure, I don't know really, those who work on medical linguistics area can tell us whether it is accepted now by the community of American linguistics as really another instance of speech area. The best known case so far is the Balkan area and even there, many questions are being asked partly because language do not remain constant, they keep on drifting, partly also because one is discovering many mismatches as the grow in our understanding of the language space. So I think there are many models we can think of, these people who have doubts in the mind about linguistic area concept, whether it is still valid can think of newer models of linguistic area or newer models of language relationship rather than calling it linguistic area and there are of course, these grey areas. One model that can be thought about is an overlapping model where broadly you can divide into two different spaces based on common and uncommon characteristics but there are other models also. We can think of many other models by have shied to propose these changes, that is the problem, we're shy to give up whatever we have said once. So that's one reason why we're meeting here, I think this meeting should tell us definitely little more about how we understand the concept of language area. Maybe it is a model which is something like this, maybe not. Maybe there's large number of overlaps in the linguistic area concepts. So I thank all of us to be able to be able to make it possible, for all of us to be together because everybody has a busy schedule. I' sure people have conferences to run to and to run from but in spite of all that, you've been able to come here to discuss, debate and decide on what directions the linguistic area concept should take within linguistics, in general or socio-linguistics I particular or geo linguistics in particular and with that I particularly thank Prof. Kelkar with his health conditions for having been able to come here. Thank you.

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