Escritas

A friend in Cape Town, Duncan Miller, has asked me whether I can actually read all the scripts in the heading of my blog. Well, yes and no. I can certainly read Jawi. I can make out 'Melaka' in both Bangla and Tamil. He also asked whether the scripts were there for decorative purposes.

Well, yes. In fact I tried several scripts until I got a combination that satisfied me. As this is a Mac, there are limitations. I cannot type in Khmer, for instance (I have tried downloading fonts but they don't work). Kannada and Oriya are also out of the question though I might be able to see the fonts if I work at it. I mention all three because they are all beautiful scripts. However, my decision to choose Jawi, Bangla, and Tamil also has to do with the place where I am. All three have a connection to Melaka, especially Jawi and Tamil (Bangla is a recent import in Malaysia, I guess, now that many immigrant labourers come from there). I have tried to add Thai, but it doesn't look good together with the other four (Portuguese in Rumi is of course one of the four. By the way, in fifteenth and sixteenth century Morocco there used to be Portuguese in Jawi. There are in fact many extant letters to the Portuguese king from his North African subjects written in Jawi). Chinese would also not look good.

Madhava Prasad, a languages specialist in Hyderabad, told me about his love of the scripts of Indian languages. It is actually a quite peculiar situation. Usually Chinese has had one script for its many languages through the centuries (now divided into two versions, traditional and simplified. Having learned Japanese first a long time ago, I hate simplified). Moreover, while India has spawned ever new languages through the centuries, China has tried to keep a hold on its linguistic diversity, especially in the twentieth century. Though Mandarin is old, its modern version is actually a twentieth century creation, and so is the fact that it is meant to be a common national language (common language is actually its name in Chinese, Mandarin being an Orientalist appelation as far as I know). Old China had a common script, not a common spoken language. All Chinese languages became in recent times therefore mere dialects of a common language. In India, important languages such as Hokkien, Cantonese or Hakka would most probably have become historically separate media with their own script. 

Madhava talks about looking for the commonalities behind the many scripts of India (all more or less mutually inintelligible). It is a beautiful idea. I am very much enamoured of scripts. Arabic was an early love. That is because in retrospect it was the only language that I could get hold of in another script that was available to me in Brasília through a language school. Accordingly, I learned Arabic in a Syrian school that was practically across the street from our apartment in SQS 303. The school was anything but religious: Syria is to this day controlled by the Baath (the sister party of the Iraqi Baath in fact - namely, Sadam Hussein's party). It has had a socialist agenda. It is not a very developed land but nor is prey to the huge inequalities of Eygpt, for instance. While a teenager I learned Arabic using primers developed for Syrian children by a socialist state. It was funny because Brasil was then under an anti-communist military dictatorship (we had relations with all communist countries, however, Cuba excepted. I still remember my very first passport had stamped on it: Válido para todos os países com os quais o Brasil mantém relações diplomáticas, exceto Cuba). I for instance learned by heart socialist poems to the fellah (the peasant), to the worker, etc. It was fun.

القبلتة الولى من الصباح لالجبة الفلّاح

The first kiss of the morning is meant for the cheek of the fellah...

My first acquaintance with Malay was through the Teach Yourself Malay in the Teach Yourself Series (no audio). It was in Rumi of course. I didn't pursue my Malay studies then (I was in fact interested in Malay because, in accordance to one now old-fashioned classification, it was an agglutinative language. I wanted to learn one). Later I looked into both Farsi and Urdu because the script was fairly similar to Arabic. Hence my interest in Jawi too (which came of course much later when I had access to the wonderful online collection of the Institut Alam dan Tamadun Melayu - ATMA).

I have learned how to read Malayalam. More often than not I cannot understand what I read. Now I am slowly learning how to read Tamil. The two languages are close to each other but their scripts, though derived from the same sources, are different. So many Mayalis for instance can understand Tamil - in Kerala Tamil movies are in fact routinely screened without subtitles and Tamil songs are even more popular than Malayalam ones - but they cannot read Tamil. My only problem in reading the name board of the temple is figuring out the Tamil for temple: கோயில். The temple was established in the late eigtheenth century - and therefore during the Dutch period - and has continuously held religious rites since then.