Bangla holds a key to hidden human

history
Azfar Aziz
 Published at 07:32 pm April 16th, 2018
 Last updated at 08:05 pm April 16th, 2018

Lessons in the old language

“In the very earliest time/when both people and animals lived on earth/a person
could become an animal if he wanted to/ and an animal could become a human
being. /Sometimes they were people/and sometimes animals/ and there was
no difference. /All spoke the same language/ that was the time when words
were like magic./The human mind had mysterious powers./ A word spoken by
chance might have strange consequences. /It would suddenly come alive/ and
what people wanted to happen could happen –/ all you had to do was say
it. Nobody could explain this: / That’s the way it was.” – Nalungiaq, an Inuit
woman interviewed by ethnologist Knud Rasmussen in the early twentieth
century. Matthew C. Bronson, an educational linguist of the USA, wrote in his
article “Lessons in the Old Language,” “The ‘old language’ that unites the
human and more-than-human worlds is a recurrent archetype in the stories of
indigenous peoples, those who have lived in intimate proximity with a particular
bioregion for time immemorial. The Cheyenne version adds another chapter to
the Inuit story:

“Long ago, people and animals and spirits and plants all communicated in the
same way. Then something happened. After that, we had to talk to each other
in human speech. But we retained the ‘old language’ for dreams and for
communicating with spirits and animals and plants.
“In the Abrahamic version (based on earlier Sumerian tales), the Tower of
Babel saga, the ‘something’ that ‘happened’ in the opening story is further
elaborated. The first common tongue was abolished by a (slightly insecure?)
god. He feared that people would use it to cooperate in building a tower that
would eventually challenge his heavenly reign. Language has always been
connected to the primal question of what it means to be human and our
relationship with nature, the invisible and unknown, the ‘Great Mystery’. “The
word in its primordial force runs through us like a current: What we say still
comes alive, as in Nalungiaq’s story, or dies in the telling. Indeed, the power of
language to create reality is a constant of the human experience. But this and
other lessons of the old language have been largely obscured in the transition
to modernity and industrial-technological civilization. When we contrast
indigenous and western languages and worldviews, we can begin to reclaim
aspects of the old language that undergird both.” The emphasis on nouns built
into the grammar of English and other Indo-European languages is so intrinsic
to its speakers’ way of thinking that it is challenging to imagine how it could be
otherwise. But Algonquin and many other native languages have chosen a
different path, a verb-based grammar in which nouns are derived from roots as
needed but are not necessarily part of every sentence. The contrast between
the two systems can be reflected in this statement: God is not a noun in Native
America.
When we say 'god' in English, we are using a noun, and easily imagining him
as a person, a separate entity somehow fixed in time and space (an old man
with a beard, for example, as in 'May He watch over us'
The toughest question from Europeans that Native Americans have ever had
was “Who is your (noun) god?” Comparatively speaking, English is very noun-
heavy, forcing its speakers to utter at least one noun-phrase per sentence in
order to make sense. We need nouns, and the noun-phrases they are part of,
in order to make complete sentences. Referring traditionally to persons, places
and things (including concepts), nouns can be seen as temporary snapshots of
a flux of activity. These snapshots are the basis upon which cultural modes of
logic and reasoning are based. When we say “god” in English, we are using a
noun, and easily imagining him as a person, a separate entity somehow fixed
in time and space (an old man with a beard, for example, as in “May He watch
over us.” Imagine what a different reading of the Bible one would have if the
word “he” or “him” was substituted systematically with “it” in referring to god –
“It is watching over you” does not have the same ring to it. Does it? From the
Native American point of view, the word “god” as a noun is a grammatically
induced hallucination like the dummy “it” in “it is raining.” The closest Lakhota
equivalent is tanka wakan, which is an adjectival-verbal construction. This
phrase has routinely been mistranslated as the “Great Mystery” but is better
glossed as “the Great Mysteriousing.” Such mistranslation is not trivial as it
obscures the deep differences between a verb-based and a noun-based
worldview. Why is this iconic image expressed in English so hard to construe
in indigenous language terms? Many indigenous languages rarely use nouns
and are much more verb-centered. Sakej Henerson, a Canadian researcher on
Native Law, says his people (Cheyenne Nation) can speak Mikmaq, an eastern
Algonquian language, all day without uttering a single noun. The Hopi term
“rehpi” means “flashed” and would be properly used when, say, one saw
lightning in the sky, without any implication at all that “something” flashed: The
flashing and “what” is flashing are coterminous. English-speakers can attempt
to step back from the way English has colonized their imaginations and turned
everything into a noun. This is, in large measure, an exercise in “getting back
to the roots.” The root word that we translate as “god” from the Hebrew Bible is
actually a verbal expression, YHWY is one transliteration – “I am.” The
shamanic, originally verbal, insights of the Old Testament prophets have been
translated into nouns in the transition to modernity, a now familiar pattern.
“But, what if god were a verb, an unfolding dynamic processing,” writes
Bronson, “Perhaps it would be harder to fight and kill as so many have done in
the name of 'god' if the native view were more widely held. Verbal thinking is
complementary, dynamic and contextual, rather than dichotomous, static and
universal. Problem situations and people are much harder to categorize as
‘things’ that one must confront and destroy in a verbal-based reasoning with
fully animate subjects.”

Unveiling human history using Bangla

Niladri Sekhar Dash in his A Descriptive Study of Bengali Words writes, “In an
inflectional language like Sanskrit, grammatical elements such as prefixes,
suffixes, case markers, etc are usually tagged with the words. However, in
some cases, due to various phonological factors, these are normally used to
make morphophonemic changes in words involved in the process of inflection.
On the other hand, in an analytic language like English, prepositions are
generally retained separate from words that follow these. “In case of Bengali
prepositions, it may be assumed that both types of characteristics are indeed
preserved in the language. Like an inflectional language, it has preserved a
large set of case markers, which are often tagged with words to generate the
Karaka or case relations among the words used in the sentence. On the other
hand, like an analytical language, it has a large list of postpositions, which are
used separately after the words to denote almost the same kind of syntactic
functions, which are generally expressed by case markers." The unique
potential of Bangla is that it’s the only language that uses both logocentric and
verb-based systems. A few of us working in this field have already been
successful in unlocking the semantic potential of the ancient texts including
those of scriptures, myths and epics.
Kalim Khan is the pioneer in this field, cutting a pathway by explaining and
instituting this verb-based semantics theory relentlessly. The Bengali Lexicon:
A Dictionary of Verb-based Letter-based Meanings of Words (Vol-I) that he co-
authored with Ravi Chakravarti and which was published in 2009 has already
triggered many an intense brain-storming session among the erudite and the
academia. In an article styled "Bangla Semantics, Antidote to Western
Amnesia," Khan and Chakravarti wrote, “It is but natural that Bangla semantics
should provide a clue to the rich cultural heritage of Bangla-speakers and
allied races of the Indian sub-continent. But this semantics is much more far-
reaching than that. Thus one marvels at the amount of light thrown by it on
many hitherto unexplained and obscure aspects of the European Tradition. “It
has of course been known for more than two centuries that the majority of
European and Indian (i.e. South Asian) languages have sprung from a common
stock. But with all their knowledge of both the West and the East, the Western
academics have not yet been able to explain adequately many features of their
own language and culture. It is here that Bangla semantics can work wonders
and furnish satisfactory solutions to a large number of problems. “According to
the logic of verb-based word-formation, the word ashwa (asva) could well be
applied to a person who could fast transmit and make effective the directive of
the center up to the limits of the realm. A specially interesting explanation
tagged to the word ashwattha (asvattha) in the authoritative Bangla dictionary
Bangiya Sabdakosh by Haricharan Bandyopadhyaya may here be referred to.
Now, the word was derived by adding -stha (roughly = situated) to the stem
ashwa (asva). The Bangiya Sabdakosh in its explanation of ashwattha
(asvattha) quotes an ancient authority to give the meaning of the word. The
quotation is ‘ashwah tishthanti asmin,’ which means ‘horses dwell here.’ One
not accustomed to the ways of verb-based semantics would find this
explanation rather bizarre. But this explanation would not appear much queer
when one is reminded of the tree ‘Yggdrasil’ of Scandinavian mythology, ‘the
ash tree binding together heaven, earth and hell,’ Yggr being a name of the
supreme god Odin and the word ‘drasil’ having the meaning ‘horse.’ One may
also recall ‘Asgard,’ the heaven of Norse (i.e. Scandinavian) mythology, [with]
‘as’ having the meaning ‘god’ and ‘gard’ meaning ‘yard.’”
The time has finally arrived to decipher the history of mankind encoded in the
myths and legends and that Bangla of all the languages carries the attributes
that makes it the potential key to those mysteries
The paucity of space forces us to forego with any more examples offered by
Khan and Chakravarti of how the verb-based semantics system helps us open
layers after layers of meaning of a word. The writer of this piece has recently
made some sketches of a few episodes of the human history encoded in myths
and epics using the verb-based semantics system and the findings in almost
all the cases contradict and even negate the understanding of those myths and
epics currently available in the mainstream epistemological world. The findings
have not been shared before as his conclusions might outrage mainstream
academia. However, he hopes a few examples of his findings may not be too
obnoxious: 1. Every deva (or ang-el, where “el” means a divine entity) have
their seats or corresponding points inside us. Michael’s seat is in the eyes and
thus is related to the Sun, Gabriel’s is in the tongue and so with
communication, Azrael’s is in the nose and thus with breathing, Rafael’s is in
the ears, i.e., with the realm of sound. The seat of chaos or uncreated nature is
in the Muladhar, Eros’s seat is in Swadishtana, Fire’s is in the naval, Vishnu’s
in the heart, Akasha’s in the throat, the full moon's in the Ajna, Siva’s in the
crown (with the nectar and poison of his moon and serpents dripping from the
Lalana Chakra), and the seat of the unspeakable One is in the Higher Heart. 2.
The myths and epics are but the history of humanity encoded following its fall
from a state of unity into individualism through accumulation of the surplus
production -- Punji (private and state-owned capital that first commenced
through hoarding of the fat of the meat -> Punj -> punji = capital). 3. First, the
state capital led by the organizational entity called Daksha [that which
instituted repetitive work for production] deviated from the natural state of
collective existence, which resulted in the conflict between Siva and Daksha
during the Daksha Jagna (or the institutionalization of the division of labor that
saw the end of Sati, the first spouse/Sakti of Siva). 4. Many centuries later, the
Vedas composed by Bedes (gypsies)/Bedus (desert nomads) and internalized
by the Brahmins came to prominence and started promoting the private sector.
Ravana was the biggest public sector entity, when Rama entered the scene
and took the side of private capital. Rama was banished by the state capital of
Ajodhya. But, at the end, through a prolonged war, the private capital came
into dominance over the state capital that had accumulated a huge number of
sycophants and beneficiaries including the intellectual bureaucrats (pundits,
priests, advisers and technocrats, in addition to the muscle power of military
forces to keep everything in check. The toiling masses would get the mere
leftovers of such bureaucratic capital. Finally, the then reformist campaign of
Rama won, and private-sector capital came to be the leading form of capital,
not forgetting the bank capital represented by Kuber. 5. At the end of the
Dwapara Yuga, the private sector again became too greedy, with Krishna, the
black money, and Arjuna, the white, went through a long and devastating war
with the public sector capital represented by Duryodhana and is brothers. Thus
the private sector with the guidance of the black money defeated the state
capitalism in the great war of Kurukshetra. Of course, at that time it was a
positive and benevolent act of freeing people from the bureaucratic suckers of
the state capital – almost similar to the Perestroika led by Gorvachev. But,
during the war, the stance of Balarama, a brother of Krishna and an
incarnation of Ananta Sesha aka Ananta Naga, sometimes translated as “the
Endless One,” was totally neutral. When Bhima, prompted by Krishna,
defeated Duryodhyana by dealing him a blow below the navel with his mace,
Balarama cried in disgust, as hitting at the opponent’s body below the naval
was considered unethical and un-chivalrous. From a number of other similar
events described to have had taken place in the wars led by Rama and
Krishna, we can surmise that the private-sector capital has never been shy of
breaking moral codes to ensure victory over its chief rival, the public sector.

Conclusion

It seems the time has finally arrived to decipher the history of mankind
encoded in the myths and legends and that Bangla of all the languages carries
the attributes that makes it the potential key to those mysteries. The task is
huge and it requires a huge collective collaboration between all the best brains
of the society, most particularly the linguists and those most advanced in
spiritual evolution.

Azfar Aziz is a Dhaka-based freelance journalist, writer and poet.