I have always been a fan on lanugages. I love learning new languages. I don’t mean the software languages, well actually maybe I do. I love learning programming languages as much as I do learning spoken/written languages. Maybe there is a connection between the two. I am digressing.
I could be philosophical about this and say that learning languages brings me closer to man or closer to culture and so on, but I am not an art and culture kind of person. But being able to speak to a person in his/her natural language gives me a sort of pleasure and makes me feel closer to that person. I do hope that person too appreciates that I am trying to talk to him/her in a language that is not my native language.
Anyway, I know a lot of languages. I speak fluently the languages English, Hindi, Tamil and Kannada as these are the languages that I have learnt and that I use to converse in regularly. Also thanks to my background and the people that I hang around with, I can also understand to an extent Bengali, Telugu and Malayalam. At least understandable to an extent that I know whether they are talking to me, or absuing me. 
Other than these 7 Indian languages(or languages used in India, to be politically correct), I have also tried my hand at learning foreign languages. I am particularly interested in the European langauges. Coming to think of it, don’t all languages have their roots in Europe? Ok, I forget the Asian languages, 100s of which originated in my own India. 
More precisely, I am interested in German and Russian as I love the sound of those languages. I joined a Germany based company thanks to which I found the motiviation to start learning German, which I know to a good extent. Then again, some others knew French, as French is a part of many educational systems in India and I wanted to know what the others knew. So I started to learn French as well. I am extremely new to French and though I have spent a few hours learning French, I decided to drop it for a while until I am comfortable with German. I want to learn one language at a time. Once I am done with these two, I have a long line of European and Asian languages that I want to learn with a few Indian languages interspersed in between.
Getting back to the point of this post, I have been reading the book Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. I want to see the movie pretty bad, but I have been holding off my urge because I want to read the book before I venture seeing the movie. I finally got a copy of the book and I have been reading it since the past 2 days. Now in this book, most of the incidents occur in Italy and many phrases used in this book are predominantly Italian. This actually reminds me of the series – The Bourne Identity, where at least every page has a few lines from a non-English language and there are quiet a few languages in the book. Makes it quite hard to read and understand what is happening in this book. However, that only reinforced my urge to learn more languages. Back to the point, what struck me while reading this is the amount of Italian that actually forms part of the English language.
Although I have not got about learning Italian, yes I have learnt a few phrases before deciding to get back to German, I could understand most of the phrases used. This was not because of I knew any Italian, this was because there were a lot of phrases that have been adopted into the English language. Many words such as ‘Quid Pro Quo‘, ‘Presto‘ and a lot more are so common in English. I believe that many words actually are attributed to Latin origins, but no matter, Latin is not a language in use these days and if these words are being used in other languages like Italian, then it give me more motivation to learn that language. Simlarly a lot of words from French are also used commonly in English.
Its quite a nice feeling. Interestingly even Malayalam which is a South Indian dravidian language has a good deal of Sanskrit influence in it. Many languages have over the years borrowed from other languages. When to look at it holistically, it shows how the word is shrinking, people are getting closer to each other, and territorial borders are being broke in more ways that one. Maybe I will think about studying languages sometime in the future.
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Tagged: bengali, books, english, french, german, hindi, italian, kannada, languages, latin, literature, malayalam, origins, russian, sanskrit, tamil