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Maithili_s_fight_against_administrative_erasure.m4a

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Part 7 · VIDEHA MITHILA MAITHILI DISCUSSION CRITICISM SERIES PART 7

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37:51

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1. 0:00–0:30तो आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ
2. 0:30–0:34for mythillie speakers in 1961, the number didn't grow.
3. 0:34–0:35It didn't even stay the same.
4. 0:35–0:38It plummeted to 4.9 million.
5. 0:38–0:39Which is just wild to think about.
6. 0:39–0:41Right, so you have to ask yourself,
7. 0:41–0:44how do millions of voices simply vanish
8. 0:44–0:45from the official government records?
9. 0:45–0:47I mean, they didn't all suddenly die off.
10. 0:47–0:48No, of course not.
11. 0:48–0:49And they didn't wake up one morning
12. 0:49–0:51with collective amnesia and just forget
13. 0:51–0:52how to speak their mother tongue.
14. 0:52–0:54Which tells us that we aren't looking
15. 0:54–0:55at a biological mystery here,
16. 0:55–0:57or even a linguistic one really.
17. 0:57–0:59Okay, so what are we looking at then?
18. 0:59–1:04We are looking at an administrative vanishing act, basically a language being systemically
19. 1:04–1:06erased from the map.
20. 1:06–1:07Wow.
21. 1:07–1:12And yet today, if you look closely at the Ganttgetic Plain and the foothills of the Himalayas,
22. 1:12–1:14that language isn't dead at all.
23. 1:14–1:15Not even close.
24. 1:15–1:16Right.
25. 1:16–1:20It is being spoken by an estimated 40 million people today.
26. 1:20–1:21Yeah, 40 million.
27. 1:21–1:24Which brings us to the mission for today's deep dive.
28. 1:24–1:28We are exploring the Vedeja English-Methli Dictionary.
29. 1:28–1:35the 2012 edition. Yes, authored by Gajendra Thakur, Gajendra Kumar Chah and Panjikar
30. 1:35–1:40Vidyanan Chah. Because when a language fights for its very existence, a dictionary stops
31. 1:40–1:45being just a dusty reference book. Pull off the shelf to win a game of Scrabble.
32. 1:45–1:47Oh, absolutely. It becomes a survival mechanism.
33. 1:47–1:51Exactly. Okay, let's unpack this because the sheer scale of what we're dealing with
34. 1:51–1:53here is staggering. It really is.
35. 1:53–1:58And it challenges everything I thought I knew about how languages are catalogued. I'll
36. 1:58–2:00I'll admit when I first picked up the source material,
37. 2:00–2:03specifically the four word written by Professor Udayan Narayanas
38. 2:03–2:07saying, I went in with a very, a very Western bias.
39. 2:07–2:08I think a lot of people do.
40. 2:08–2:09Yeah.
41. 2:09–2:10You think of dictionary making and you
42. 2:10–2:12picture guys in powdered wigs, right?
43. 2:12–2:13Right, like Samuel Johnson.
44. 2:13–2:14Exactly.
45. 2:14–2:17Samuel Johnson in London in 1755 or Robert
46. 2:17–2:21Codrie writing a table alphabetical in 1604.
47. 2:21–2:24You imagine them sitting by candlelight,
48. 2:24–2:26inventing the concept of alphabetizing words.
49. 2:26–2:28It is a very common misconception.
50. 2:28–2:32I mean, we are taught that the Enlightenment era in Europe birthed the modern encyclopedia
51. 2:32–2:37and the dictionary, but Professor Singh's foreword provides a profound reality check for
52. 2:37–2:39that worldview.
53. 2:39–2:45English, as a distinct codified language, is actually a relatively recent phenomenon on
54. 2:45–2:47the global timeline.
55. 2:47–2:48How reason are we talking?
56. 2:48–2:51Well, to put it sharply into perspective, the oldest available written treatise in
57. 2:51–2:55in Mithili was authored by a scholar named Juryo Tirishwara.
58. 2:55–2:56Okay.
59. 2:56–3:00And he was writing this during the exact same period that Jeffrey Chaucer was just beginning
60. 3:00–3:04to establish the literary prestige of Middle English with the Canterbury tale.
61. 3:04–3:05Oh, wow.
62. 3:05–3:07So Mithili's literary roots run parallel to English.
63. 3:07–3:08Exactly.
64. 3:08–3:13But the human tradition of actually making dictionaries, that predates English by millennia.
65. 3:13–3:14Right.
66. 3:14–3:19Because the foreword traces this back to the erstwhile Akkadian empire to the city
67. 3:19–3:21of Ebla in modern day Syria.
68. 3:21–3:26And the timeline here is, I mean, it's hard to infat him.
69. 3:26–3:28We're talking about 2300 BC.
70. 3:28–3:29It's ancient.
71. 3:29–3:32But I'm trying to picture the lived reality of that.
72. 3:32–3:34I can understand why I need a dictionary in 2026.
73. 3:34–3:39I'm trying to read a complicated article or, you know, learn a new software term.
74. 3:39–3:40Sure.
75. 3:40–3:46But why did a civilization over 4,000 years ago need a bilingual Sumerian Acadian
76. 3:46–3:47word list?
77. 3:47–3:49Were they just casually studying foreign languages?
78. 3:49–3:50No.
79. 3:50–3:55more pragmatic than that, and in many ways much more urgent than casual study.
80. 3:55–3:59You really have to look at the geopolitical shift happening in Mesopotamia around 2300
81. 3:59–4:00BC.
82. 4:00–4:01Okay, set the scene for us.
83. 4:01–4:06So the Sumerian civilization, which had invented one of the earliest forms of writing cuneiform,
84. 4:06–4:10was being culturally and politically absorbed by the Akkadian-speaking empire.
85. 4:10–4:13Okay, so a hostile takeover basically.
86. 4:13–4:14Pretty much.
87. 4:14–4:17Sumerian was slowly becoming a dead-spoken language, but it remained the prestigious
88. 4:17–4:20language of law, religion, and ancient administration.
89. 4:20–4:23Oh, so all the important documents were still in Sumerian?
90. 4:23–4:24Exactly.
91. 4:24–4:28If you were an Akkadian scribe, a judge, or a priest, you needed to know exactly what
92. 4:28–4:32the ancient Sumerian contracts and hymns meant.
93. 4:32–4:38So they created these clay tablets, they etched Sumerian logograms on one side, and the
94. 4:38–4:40phonetic Akkadian translations on the other.
95. 4:40–4:44It was just an administrative necessity to keep their society functioning.
96. 4:44–4:46So it wasn't about expanding their vocabulary.
97. 4:46–4:51It was about preventing total systemic collapse as power shifted hands.
98. 4:51–4:52Exactly.
99. 4:52–4:55Because you lose the translation, you lose the ancient laws.
100. 4:55–4:56Precisely.
101. 4:56–4:59And this instinct to catalog and preserve appears everywhere.
102. 4:59–5:04I mean the source material mentions the Ur-a-hu-bulu glossary from the 2nd millennium BC.
103. 5:04–5:07Right, which was a massive encyclopedia of legal and agricultural terms.
104. 5:07–5:08Risk.
105. 5:08–5:13And then you move forward to the Greek tradition in the 1st century CE, where Apollonius
106. 5:13–5:16the Sophist was cataloging Homeric vocabulary.
107. 5:16–5:22Now I assume that was because by the first century, Homer's ancient Greek from the Iliad
108. 5:22–5:27already sounded archaic to them, like us trying to read Shakespeare today.
109. 5:27–5:28Exactly.
110. 5:28–5:31They needed a glossary just to understand their own foundational myths.
111. 5:31–5:32That makes total sense.
112. 5:32–5:35And you see similar preservation efforts in the East too.
113. 5:35–5:39The Chinese tradition stretches back to the third century BC.
114. 5:39–5:40Wow.
115. 5:40–5:47And the Japanese compiled the Nina Glossary of Chinese characters in 682 CE.
116. 5:47–5:54Their oldest existing complete dictionary, the Tenre Ban Shimegi, dates back to 835 CE.
117. 5:54–5:55That's incredible.
118. 5:55–6:00And we certainly cannot ignore the Arabic world, which was compiling monumental, exhaustive,
119. 6:00–6:06general-purpose dictionaries like the Lisanal Arab in the 13th century, long before Samuel
120. 6:06–6:07Johnson was even born.
121. 6:07–6:11So this global obsession with word catching is universal.
122. 6:11–6:15But Professor Singh makes a very distinct argument about the Indian tradition of lexicography.
123. 6:15–6:16He does, yes.
124. 6:16–6:20He says it wasn't just driven by legal administration or translating foreign languages for trade.
125. 6:20–6:24The motivation was deeply spiritual, almost to the point of being mathematical.
126. 6:24–6:30Yeah, the Indian tradition is a fascinating divergence in the history of linguistics.
127. 6:30–6:34In ancient India, the primary driver for grammatical and lexicographical works
128. 6:34–6:39was the absolute flawless preservation of Vedic literature.
129. 6:39–6:40Right, the Vedas.
130. 6:40–6:44Yes, the Vedas were oral traditions long before they were written down,
131. 6:44–6:50and their power, their spiritual efficacy, essentially relied on exact pronunciation
132. 6:50–6:53and exact morphological understanding.
133. 6:53–6:55Okay, I want to pause on that word for a second,
134. 6:55–6:59because the forward dies into some heavy linguistic concepts here.
135. 6:59–7:00It does get quite technical.
136. 7:00–7:04Yeah, like morphological understanding and morphophonological theories.
137. 7:04–7:10For the listener who hasn't taken a graduate linguistic seminar, can we get a quick, like
138. 7:10–7:14I'm five on what these ancient Indian scholars were actually doing to the language?
139. 7:14–7:15Sure.
140. 7:15–7:17Think of language like a complex Lego structure.
141. 7:17–7:19Okay, Legos, I'm with you.
142. 7:19–7:22If you just look at the Finnish castle, that is the whole sentence.
143. 7:22–7:26But what scholars like Panini did thousands of years ago was take the castle completely
144. 7:26–7:27apart.
145. 7:27–7:28Oh, they deconstructed it.
146. 7:28–7:29Exactly.
147. 7:29–7:31They didn't just define what a word meant.
148. 7:31–7:36They broke every single word down into its absolute fundamental building blocks.
149. 7:36–7:42They isolated the root of the word, the central action or concept, and then they isolated the
150. 7:42–7:47suffix or prefix that gave it tense, or gender, or plurality.
151. 7:47–7:52So morphology is the study of how those Lego blocks fit together to build meaning.
152. 7:52–7:53Exactly.
153. 7:53–7:57And phonology is the study of how the sounds change when you snap those blocks together.
154. 7:57–8:00Penini and his contemporaries were basically developing
155. 8:00–8:03exhaustive mathematical formulas algorithms essentially.
156. 8:03–8:07That predicted exactly how Sanskrit words were formed.
157. 8:07–8:09Okay, so they were treating human language
158. 8:09–8:10like a piece of software code.
159. 8:10–8:12That is an excellent analogy, yeah.
160. 8:12–8:14They were early data scientists.
161. 8:14–8:15They absolutely were.
162. 8:15–8:17They realized that you can't just memorize
163. 8:17–8:19every single word in existence.
164. 8:19–8:20No, it's impossible.
165. 8:20–8:23But if you can understand the deep underlying rules,
166. 8:23–8:25the root suffix segmentations,
167. 8:25–8:28You can generate or decode any word perfectly.
168. 8:28–8:30This tradition of deep structural analysis
169. 8:30–8:33really laid the groundwork for Indian lexicography.
170. 8:33–8:36Which brings us to the actual dictionaries they produced.
171. 8:36–8:40The foreword mentions the Negantu from 700 BC.
172. 8:40–8:41Yes.
173. 8:41–8:45And that categorized words based on synonymy and homonymy.
174. 8:45–8:47So words that mean the same thing or sound the same.
175. 8:47–8:48Correct.
176. 8:48–8:50And then we get to the heavy hitter.
177. 8:50–8:53Amarasimas Amarakosa from the sixth century AD.
178. 8:53–8:55A monumental text.
179. 8:55–8:59The text notes that this was a dictionary of synonyms, but here's the detail that just
180. 8:59–9:01stopped me in my tracks.
181. 9:01–9:02Oh, the commentaries.
182. 9:02–9:03Yes.
183. 9:03–9:09The catalogus catalogorum, which I gather is this giant registry of Sanskrit manuscripts,
184. 9:09–9:13lists at least 40 different commentaries written solely on the America Cosa.
185. 9:13–9:14At least 40, yes.
186. 9:14–9:1640 commentaries on a dictionary.
187. 9:16–9:20I mean, I can understand scholars spending centuries writing commentaries on a religious
188. 9:20–9:23text or major philosophical treatise.
189. 9:23–9:27Why are generations of brilliant scholars obsessing over a thesaurus?
190. 9:27–9:30It seems totally baffling to a modern reader, right?
191. 9:30–9:32Because we treat a dictionary like a quick search engine.
192. 9:32–9:34Yeah, you just look up the spelling and close the tab.
193. 9:34–9:39Exactly. But you have to understand the pedagogical culture of classical India.
194. 9:39–9:43The Amerikosa wasn't a book you kept on a desk to consult occasionally.
195. 9:43–9:44It was a text you memorized.
196. 9:44–9:46Memorized. The whole thing.
197. 9:46–9:52Yes. It was written in verse, in specific meters, specifically so it could be chanted and memorized.
198. 9:52–9:59When a student memorized the Americosa, they were essentially downloading a massive highly organized ontological database of the universe
199. 10:00–10:04Right into their brain. Oh, wow. So it wasn't just an alphabetical list of words
200. 10:04–10:11It was a map of how they categorized reality precisely it categorized the world into sections the heavens the earth time
201. 10:12–10:17Human anatomy the underworld that's incredible. So when later scholars wrote commentaries on it
202. 10:17–10:19They weren't just arguing about spelling
203. 10:19–10:25They were debating nuance, etymology, and how different philosophical schools interpreted those core concepts.
204. 10:25–10:26I see.
205. 10:26–10:30The Americosa became the gravitational center of intellectual life in ancient India.
206. 10:30–10:35It spawned an entire ecosystem of similar lexicons over the following centuries.
207. 10:35–10:40From the 11th century Namamalika to the 17th century Siddhishth Abdullaynava.
208. 10:40–10:48Okay, so I'm looking at this immense, mathematically precise, ancient tradition of Indian lexicography.
209. 10:48–10:49and it brings me back to my source question.
210. 10:49–10:51The delay of the Mathili dictionary.
211. 10:51–10:54Right. If the tradition is so robust
212. 10:54–10:56and the academic machinery for organizing language
213. 10:56–10:59has existed in India for millennia,
214. 10:59–11:02why did a comprehensive modern English Mathili dictionary
215. 11:02–11:07like the Videha take until 2012 to finally materialize?
216. 11:07–11:08What's fascinating here is that the delay
217. 11:08–11:11has absolutely nothing to do with a lack
218. 11:11–11:13of intellectual capability among Mathili scholars.
219. 11:13–11:14Okay.
220. 11:14–11:17Nor is it a sign of a weak literary tradition.
221. 11:17–11:23The delay is entirely symptomatic of the incredibly complex, shifting and often hostile reality
222. 11:23–11:26of the Mothili language's geographic and political environment.
223. 11:26–11:28Because language doesn't exist in a vacuum.
224. 11:28–11:29Exactly.
225. 11:29–11:34You cannot separate a dictionary from the sociopolitical reality of the people who actually speak
226. 11:34–11:35the language.
227. 11:35–11:36Right.
228. 11:36–11:39And I was trying to picture this geography based on the source text.
229. 11:39–11:44If Mothili is surrounded by massive, dominant languages like Hindi and Bengali, my initial
230. 11:44–11:50hypothesis was that the physical borders of the Methyli speaking region must be incredibly rigid.
231. 11:50–11:55Like a fortress. Yeah, exactly. Like they must have lived in a very isolated protected pocket
232. 11:55–12:00to keep the language distinct for all these centuries. It is actually the exact opposite.
233. 12:00–12:05Really? Yes. The physical borders of the Methyli speaking region, a cultural area known as
234. 12:05–12:12Methila, are profoundly fluid, both naturally and politically. See it how? Well geographically,
235. 12:12–12:17it spans the Gengetic Plain in the Indian state of Bihar, stretching up into the Tari
236. 12:17–12:19region at the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal.
237. 12:19–12:24Right. The text said about 14% of Nepal's population speaks Mithali, which is huge.
238. 12:24–12:29It is. It also reaches into parts of the state of Harkin. But defining exactly where Mithila
239. 12:29–12:34begins and ends is like trying to draw a line in the sand during a windstorm.
240. 12:34–12:38And the sources highlight a natural factor that just blew my mind regarding this, the
241. 12:38–12:39Koshy River.
242. 12:39–12:42Ah, yes. The Koshy River.
243. 12:42–12:47It runs right through the heart of this region, and historically it is notoriously unstable.
244. 12:47–12:51The text notes that has changed its course seven times in the last 200 years.
245. 12:51–12:56Yes, it's actually known as the Sorrow of Bihar because of the devastating floods.
246. 12:56–12:59But linguistically, imagine the chaos of that.
247. 12:59–13:04If a river is your natural border, and that river moves a hundred miles to the west over
248. 13:04–13:10a century dividing villages, separating communities, scrambling trade routes, how do you even
249. 13:10–13:12map a linguistic demographic.
250. 13:12–13:13You really can't.
251. 13:13–13:18The natural volatility of the Kershi River is a perfect metaphor for the political volatility
252. 13:18–13:19of the region, too.
253. 13:19–13:20What do you mean?
254. 13:20–13:23The administrative boundaries of districts in Bihar have been redrawn continuously by
255. 13:23–13:24the government.
256. 13:24–13:29A region that was once broadly defined by five large districts was later topped up
257. 13:29–13:32and split into 31 smaller districts.
258. 13:32–13:33Oh wow.
259. 13:33–13:37And out of those 31, about 10 are considered the core Mothly speech area.
260. 13:37–13:45So you have a major natural landmark that keeps moving and you have political bureaucrats constantly redrawing the map lines underneath the actual population
261. 13:45–13:51And when you constantly move the borders the data gets distorted exactly which brings us back to that
262. 13:51–13:58Unbelievable mystery from the intro the census numbers right the missing millions. Let's look at exactly what happened between
263. 13:58–14:031891 and 1961 because it's one of the most glaring statistical anomalies
264. 14:03–14:05I've ever seen well as we discussed in
265. 14:05–14:081891 the renowned linguist George Abraham Greerson
266. 14:09–14:14Conducted exhaustive surveys and estimated the number of Mathili speakers to be about 9.2 million
267. 14:15–14:19Right and Greerson's work is considered pretty rock-solid isn't it?
268. 14:19–14:24Oh highly respected his linguistic survey of India is still foundational for scholars today. He was
269. 14:25–14:27meticulous. Okay, so we have a solid baseline
270. 14:27–14:359.2 million speakers in 1891 then we arrive at the 1961 census now keep in mind India's population has grown
271. 14:35–14:39tremendously since 1891. Massively. But the official government census records only about
272. 14:39–14:444.9 million Mothilli speakers. It just doesn't make any mathematical sense. It doesn't. And
273. 14:44–14:49then, jumping forward again, the 2001 census suddenly shows a massive spike back up to
274. 14:49–14:55over 1.2 crore, which is 12 million. Okay. Yet, Professor Singh, in his forward to the
275. 14:55–15:00dictionary, looks at the demographic realities and estimates the actual number of speakers
276. 15:00–15:06today is likely closer to 40 million. 40 million. That is more than the entire population of Canada.
277. 15:07–15:11How do you misplace a population the size of Canada in the official data?
278. 15:11–15:15Well, according to the detailed historical analysis presented in Professor Singh's
279. 15:15–15:20foreword, this tremendous fluctuation is not a natural demographic event at all.
280. 15:20–15:20So what is it?
281. 15:20–15:26It points directly to a historical sociopolitical dynamic. First, you have to understand that
282. 15:26–15:31This region is a highly multilingual melting pot.
283. 15:31–15:33Maitley doesn't exist in a vacuum.
284. 15:33–15:35It is surrounded by 12 other languages.
285. 15:35–15:37Wait, 12 in one region?
286. 15:37–15:40Yes, you have Wujpuri and Magahi,
287. 15:40–15:42an immediate proximity with Hindi
288. 15:42–15:45acting as a superimposed dominant administrative language
289. 15:45–15:46across all three communities.
290. 15:46–15:48Okay, that sounds complicated enough.
291. 15:48–15:49And it gets more complicated.
292. 15:49–15:51You also have Bengali, Nepali, Urdu,
293. 15:51–15:53and several Austro-Azerianic languages
294. 15:53–15:55like Santali and Mundari,
295. 15:55–15:57all coexisting in rubbing shoulders.
296. 15:57–15:59So it's incredibly diverse.
297. 15:59–16:02But how does that explain the missing millions
298. 16:02–16:03in the census data?
299. 16:03–16:07The text notes a very specific and highly controversial
300. 16:07–16:09claim regarding these census numbers.
301. 16:09–16:12Now, we're just reporting what the source material states
302. 16:12–16:13here.
303. 16:13–16:13Of course.
304. 16:13–16:16Let's just look at the arguments presented in the text.
305. 16:16–16:18According to Professor Singh's analysis,
306. 16:18–16:21there was a historical disinformation campaign
307. 16:21–16:24spread by certain groups with the express goal
308. 16:24–16:27of classifying Mathili not as a distinct language,
309. 16:27–16:29but merely as a dialect of Hindi.
310. 16:29–16:32Okay, and what is the text claim
311. 16:32–16:33was the motivation for that?
312. 16:33–16:36The forward argues that the goal was to artificially inflate
313. 16:36–16:38the official number of Hindi speakers
314. 16:38–16:40in the national census data,
315. 16:40–16:43thereby consolidating political and cultural power
316. 16:43–16:45for the Hindi speaking lobby.
317. 16:45–16:48I see, because if Mathili is officially just a dialect,
318. 16:48–16:50then all those millions of Mathili speakers
319. 16:50–16:52get counted as Hindi speakers in the ledger.
320. 16:52–16:57Exactly. The math shifts in their favor. The text points out that part of this narrative
321. 16:57–17:01relied on pushing a myth that Mathili was a language only spoken by elite Brahmans.
322. 17:01–17:06Oh, to make it seem like a tiny minority. Right. Making it seem like a niche,
323. 17:06–17:12upper caste quirk rather than a mass language. And how does the source text address that claim?
324. 17:12–17:16Professor Singh directly contradicts this in the forward. He cites the actual caste composition
325. 17:16–17:21of the region and notes the incredibly high percentage of Muslims in the area who actively
326. 17:21–17:24return, Mithili, as their mother tongue on the census.
327. 17:24–17:25Okay.
328. 17:25–17:29It is a fascinating historical claim to read through.
329. 17:29–17:35Professor Singh's foreword lays out a very clear case that sociopolitical maneuvering,
330. 17:35–17:39whether through the physical drawing of district lines or the academic classification of a
331. 17:39–17:42language, has a massive real-world impact.
332. 17:42–17:44A huge impact.
333. 17:44–17:48Because when a language is not constitutionally recognized by the state or when it is forcibly
334. 17:48–17:53reclassified as a sub-dialect of something else, it effectively disappears from the official
335. 17:53–17:54reality.
336. 17:54–17:55Yes.
337. 17:55–17:58Even if 40 million people are speaking in their kitchens, at the markets, and to their
338. 17:58–17:59children.
339. 17:59–18:04And the ripple effects of that official marginalization are profound, especially when we talk about
340. 18:04–18:05dictionary making.
341. 18:05–18:06Right, getting back to the dictionary.
342. 18:06–18:11If the state doesn't recognize your language, there is no official funding for it.
343. 18:11–18:15There are no university grants to build comprehensive linguistic tools.
344. 18:15–18:16No government support.
345. 18:16–18:17None.
346. 18:17–18:22mandate to teach it in schools. The language is basically starved of the institutional
347. 18:22–18:26infrastructure that allows it to standardize and modernize.
348. 18:26–18:30Here's where it gets really interesting, though. If you look at human history, usually when
349. 18:30–18:36a community is denied constitutional rights for decades, and their numbers are systematically
350. 18:36–18:39suppressed in official censuses, the language dies.
351. 18:39–18:40It fades away.
352. 18:40–18:44Yeah, it gets crushed under the weight of the dominant culture. The youth abandon
353. 18:44–18:50it for the language of upward mobility. But Professor Singh makes a beautifully counterintuitive
354. 18:50–18:55observation of the forward. He does. He calls this period of intense marginalization a boon
355. 18:55–19:00in disguise for Methili. It is a profound testament to the resilience of human culture.
356. 19:01–19:05He argues that the denial of recognition didn't crush the Methili spirit at all.
357. 19:05–19:11It ignited it. It sparked a fire. Exactly. It added an incredible vigor to their literary
358. 19:11–19:17and cultural activity. When the community felt their core identity was under threat of erasure,
359. 19:17–19:19they didn't assimilate. They doubled down.
360. 19:19–19:24Right. The text notes that this is the era when they produced massive amounts of literature.
361. 19:24–19:25Yes.
362. 19:25–19:30And it wasn't just words on a page either. The same cultural defiance pushed their visual
363. 19:30–19:36arts onto the global stage. Madhubani painting, which is also known as Mathila art.
364. 19:36–19:37Oh, those are stunning.
365. 19:37–19:42incredibly intricate geometric vibrant paintings that originated from women
366. 19:42–19:46decorating the mud walls of their homes. Right, the domestic art. Suddenly it
367. 19:46–19:50exploded. They transitioned to paper and canvas, reached the national market in
368. 19:50–19:54India and eventually became internationally renowned. The community
369. 19:54–19:57essentially said, if you won't recognize us on your census forms, we will make
370. 19:57–20:01our culture so undeniably brilliant that you cannot ignore us. It is the
371. 20:01–20:05ultimate cultural defense mechanism and eventually that sheer stubborn
372. 20:05–20:08perseverance actually paid off.
373. 20:08–20:09It did.
374. 20:09–20:13After decades of struggle, Mathili was finally included in the eighth schedule of the Indian
375. 20:13–20:15Constitution in 2003.
376. 20:15–20:16Which is huge.
377. 20:16–20:17Yes.
378. 20:17–20:20This granted it the official recognition at the national level that it had long been
379. 20:20–20:21denied.
380. 20:21–20:25And that constitutional victory completely changes the game, right?
381. 20:25–20:28Because you aren't just fighting for survival in the shadows anymore, you have a seat
382. 20:28–20:29at the table.
383. 20:29–20:30Exactly.
384. 20:30–20:35But with official status comes an entirely new, daunting set of challenges.
385. 20:35–20:36Like what?
386. 20:36–20:41Well, once you have constitutional recognition, the users of the language, the students, the
387. 20:41–20:44civil servants, the journalists, they start demanding modern tools.
388. 20:44–20:45Oh, I see.
389. 20:45–20:48It is no longer enough to just have ancient poetry.
390. 20:48–20:50They need online easines.
391. 20:50–20:52They need searchable dictionaries.
392. 20:52–20:54They need it to work in the modern world.
393. 20:54–20:55Right.
394. 20:55–20:58They need mobile glossaries and automated question and answer systems.
395. 20:58–21:04They need a way to interface with the rapidly digitizing 21st century entirely in their
396. 21:04–21:09mother tongue. Which brings us to the actual physical or rather digital and
397. 21:09–21:15physical creation of the Vidae English-Mathili dictionary. Yes, the dictionary itself.
398. 21:15–21:19How do you standardize a language that has survived primarily through deep
399. 21:19–21:24literary traditions and local spoken dialects while swimming in a sea of
400. 21:24–21:2912 other languages? You have to build a bridge. A massive, heavily engineered
401. 21:29–21:33bridge. Let's look at the anatomy of this dictionary because the authors just
402. 21:33–21:37through together a quick phrase book here. Not at all. The first thing you realize when you dive
403. 21:37–21:43into the mechanics of the Deja is that it is an exhaustive, rigorous, linguistic undertaking.
404. 21:43–21:48Right. But before we analyze the phonetic translations or the technical vocabulary,
405. 21:48–21:53I think it is crucial to look at page Roman numeral five of the source document.
406. 21:53–21:58Dedication page. Yes. I'm so glad you brought this up. Because when we look at these massive
407. 21:58–22:03monumental reference books. We tend to view them as cold academic objects.
408. 22:03–22:08We do. We forget the humans behind it. Exactly. We forget the actual human beings who sat at a desk
409. 22:08–22:13day after day, year after year, typing out thousands of entries. And the dedication page of the
410. 22:13–22:19Vedea grounds this massive academic achievement in deep, intimate, multi-generational love.
411. 22:19–22:25It really does. Kajendra Thakur dedicates his work to his father, his mother, his wife,
412. 22:25–22:28pretty and his son Alum and daughter Asta.
413. 22:28–22:29Beautiful.
414. 22:29–22:34The agenda Kamarajah dedicates it to the memory of his father, grandfather and great grandfather.
415. 22:34–22:39Panjikur Vida Manita dedicates it to his parents and his wife.
416. 22:40–22:43It reminds you that this isn't just an academic exercise for these men.
417. 22:43–22:44No, not at all.
418. 22:44–22:49They are building a linguistic house for their children to live in and honoring the ancestors
419. 22:49–22:51who kept the language alive in the dark times.
420. 22:51–22:58It is a labor of profound devotion. And that level of care translates directly into the
421. 22:58–23:00technical execution of the dictionary.
422. 23:00–23:01Now so?
423. 23:01–23:05They understood that to make this tool useful for the future, they couldn't cut corners.
424. 23:05–23:09They didn't just provide Mathili equivalents for English words. They engineered a dual-script
425. 23:09–23:12interface with complex pronunciation guides.
426. 23:12–23:13Oh right.
427. 23:13–23:18They actually created an international phonetic Mathili alphabet. And they presented the Mathili
428. 23:18–23:23words in both the widely used Devanagari script, which is what Hindi and Sanskrit use, and the
429. 23:23–23:26native mytholokshara script, also known as Tirhuta.
430. 23:26–23:30I spent a lot of time looking at this phonetic guide in the source text.
431. 23:30–23:31It is incredibly detailed.
432. 23:31–23:32It is.
433. 23:32–23:36They use the international phonetic alphabet, the IPA symbols.
434. 23:36–23:40So you aren't just guessing how to say a word based on English letters.
435. 23:40–23:47You see the phonetic schwa symbol, the wam to denote that soft mmm sound.
436. 23:47–23:51You see notations for elongated vowels like I and you.
437. 23:51–23:54It is a serious, mathematically rigorous tool.
438. 23:54–23:56It provides absolute phonetic clarity.
439. 23:56–23:57Yeah.
440. 23:57–23:59If a non-native speaker or a young person in the diaspora
441. 23:59–24:01who never heard their grandparents speak
442. 24:01–24:03wants to learn exactly how to form
443. 24:03–24:05these specific sounds in their mouth,
444. 24:05–24:07the data is right there.
445. 24:07–24:08It's all laid out for them.
446. 24:08–24:11But you know, the true marvel of the dictionary
447. 24:11–24:13reveals itself when you look at the actual vocabulary
448. 24:13–24:14they chose to include.
449. 24:14–24:15Absolutely.
450. 24:15–24:19This text provides us with a cross-section of words starting with the letter A.
451. 24:19–24:23And the sheer staggering variety of human experience they are trying to capture under one letter
452. 24:23–24:25is a feat of lexical engineering.
453. 24:25–24:26It really is.
454. 24:26–24:32You have the foundational, everyday words of human existence.
455. 24:32–24:34Abdomen is translated anatomically as...
456. 24:34–24:35Pain.
457. 24:35–24:36Or face.
458. 24:36–24:37Basic biology.
459. 24:37–24:42You have concepts of spatial awareness, like the word A-back, maybe backward or taken
460. 24:42–24:43by surprise.
461. 24:43–24:46They translate it beautifully as Virvice.
462. 24:46–24:47Very functional.
463. 24:47–24:54But then as you are scrolling down the A's, you stumble across a word that is so hyper-specific
464. 24:54–24:56it feels like it fell out of a different universe.
465. 24:56–24:57Alpern stock.
466. 24:57–24:58Yes.
467. 24:58–24:59An Alpern stock.
468. 24:59–25:00I mean.
469. 25:00–25:04A long wooden stick with an iron spike at the bottom used historically by mountaineers
470. 25:04–25:05in the Alps.
471. 25:05–25:06Right.
472. 25:06–25:10I was looking at this thinking, how on earth do you translate Alpern stock into a language
473. 25:10–25:14spoken primarily on the flat, gangetic planes.
474. 25:14–25:15It's a great question.
475. 25:15–25:18And the dictionary doesn't just invent a nonsense word,
476. 25:18–25:20and it doesn't just borrow the English word wholesale.
477. 25:20–25:21No, they don't.
478. 25:21–25:23It provides this beautifully descriptive,
479. 25:23–25:28highly functional phrase of Saras's,
480. 25:28–25:29or Saras's braised the one she does
481. 25:29–25:32once this is Berozia, which is a mouthful.
482. 25:32–25:34It is.
483. 25:34–25:35But if you break that down literally,
484. 25:35–25:38it translates to a stick with an iron handle
485. 25:38–25:40that comes in handy during mountaineering.
486. 25:40–25:43It is a perfect example of descriptive translation.
487. 25:43–25:45The lexicographers are demonstrating
488. 25:45–25:48that Mephili doesn't have a conceptual ceiling.
489. 25:48–25:50It has the syntactic flexibility
490. 25:50–25:53to describe absolutely anything on the planet,
491. 25:53–25:56even an obscure European mountaineering tool
492. 25:56–25:59using its own native vocabulary.
493. 25:59–26:02but while the descriptive translation of an outprint stock is charming,
494. 26:02–26:08there is a much more aggressive, deliberate pattern in vocabulary they chose to include.
495. 26:08–26:10Ah, yes. The tech terminology.
496. 26:10–26:15Yes. Intermixed with ancient words, religious words, and agricultural words,
497. 26:15–26:20there is a massive injection of highly technical 21st century computer terminology.
498. 26:20–26:21It's very prominent.
499. 26:21–26:24I mean deeply specific software engineering concepts.
500. 26:24–26:28Why are the authors dedicating so much space to computer science in a dictionary
501. 26:28–26:32for a language that traces its roots back to the 14th century.
502. 26:32–26:34Well, if we connect this to the bigger picture,
503. 26:34–26:37this specific vocabulary choice is the ultimate realization
504. 26:37–26:41of Professor Singh's point about needing modern tools.
505. 26:41–26:41Okay, how so?
506. 26:41–26:44Languages die when they become archaic.
507. 26:44–26:47If a language can only be used to discuss poetry,
508. 26:47–26:49religion, and farming,
509. 26:49–26:51but cannot be used to discuss the internet,
510. 26:51–26:54software, or modern medicine,
511. 26:54–26:56the speakers will compartmentalize it.
512. 26:56–26:57Oh, I see.
513. 26:57–26:58They will use methyli at home,
514. 26:58–27:01but they will switch to English or Hindi
515. 27:01–27:02the second they sit at a computer.
516. 27:02–27:04Right, because they don't have the words for it.
517. 27:04–27:06Exactly.
518. 27:06–27:07Over time, the language shrinks
519. 27:07–27:10into the domestic sphere and dies.
520. 27:10–27:13The authors of the Vidae are actively retrofitting
521. 27:13–27:15Mathili for the digital age to prevent that.
522. 27:15–27:17They are declaring that Mathili can
523. 27:17–27:20and must speak digital.
524. 27:20–27:22They are aggressively claiming their space
525. 27:22–27:23in the modern economy.
526. 27:23–27:24Oh, yes they are.
527. 27:24–27:25Because look at these entries.
528. 27:25–27:29They actually have a translation for about G-ANIO,
529. 27:29–27:33which is a highly specific open source desktop environment
530. 27:33–27:34for Linux operating system.
531. 27:34–27:36Yeah, that's incredibly niche.
532. 27:36–27:38They translate it as non-justjayer.
533. 27:38–27:40They have an entry for absolute URL.
534. 27:40–27:42They translate it as NURS2SETCHET,
535. 27:42–27:45defining it as an internet signal with a domain name.
536. 27:45–27:49The linguistic precision required to do this is remarkable.
537. 27:49–27:51Consider the word algorithm.
538. 27:51–27:52Okay.
539. 27:52–27:53It is a fundamental concept in mathematics
540. 27:53–27:55and computer science.
541. 27:55–27:58The dictionary translates it as Corona Vidi.
542. 27:58–28:00They aren't just transliterating
543. 28:00–28:02the English word algorithm into my Philly script.
544. 28:02–28:04No, they're building it from scratch.
545. 28:04–28:05Exactly.
546. 28:05–28:07They are reaching back into an incantant,
547. 28:07–28:09Sanskrit mathematical roots
548. 28:09–28:12to construct a native equivalent.
549. 28:12–28:16Vidi relates to a rule, method, or procedure.
550. 28:16–28:19Kalana relates to calculation or counting.
551. 28:19–28:22A method of calculation and algorithm.
552. 28:22–28:23That is brilliant.
553. 28:23–28:26They are using the exact same root suffix mastery
554. 28:26–28:29that Penini used thousands of years ago,
555. 28:29–28:31but applying it to modern software design.
556. 28:31–28:32It's a direct lineage.
557. 28:32–28:34It is deeply practical too.
558. 28:34–28:36They have entries for database management,
559. 28:36–28:38active database, they have network security terms,
560. 28:38–28:39access control list.
561. 28:39–28:40Right.
562. 28:40–28:42They even translate fundamental user interface commands.
563. 28:42–28:44The button you click to add, remove software
564. 28:44–28:48is translated directly as SunToonViz and Vasey2Gone.
565. 28:48–28:51It immediately familiarizes the digital environment.
566. 28:51–28:54When you look at an operating system and see active window,
567. 28:54–28:57the window you are currently interacting with
568. 28:57–29:00on your screen, the dictionary translates it phonetically
569. 29:00–29:04as karashloh, krashal, meaning active or functional.
570. 29:04–29:09And I saw analog computer rendered as some of the Drescha.
571. 29:09–29:10Beautiful.
572. 29:10–29:10It is poetry.
573. 29:10–29:11Yeah.
574. 29:11–29:15They are taking sterile English tech jargon
575. 29:15–29:17and rendering it with the gravity and precision
576. 29:17–29:19of ancient Indo-Aryan roots.
577. 29:19–29:21It really elevates the language.
578. 29:21–29:23And the implication of this is massive.
579. 29:23–29:26It means a young student growing up in Darbanga,
580. 29:26–29:28or a teenager in the Tarai region,
581. 29:28–29:31doesn't have to check their cultural identity at the door
582. 29:31–29:32when they decide to learn coding
583. 29:32–29:34or pursue computer science.
584. 29:34–29:36No, the vocabulary already exists.
585. 29:36–29:37It is waiting for them.
586. 29:37–29:39The dictionary validates the language
587. 29:39–29:40as a vehicle for the future,
588. 29:40–29:42not just a museum piece of the past.
589. 29:42–29:44It creates a seamless cultural tapestry.
590. 29:44–29:46But you know, the dictionary doesn't just focus
591. 29:46–29:47on the high tech future.
592. 29:47–29:48No.
593. 29:48–29:53It is also a deeply honest reflection of the messy, hybridized reality of how a
594. 29:53–29:57methili speaker navigates the modern world on a daily basis.
595. 29:57–30:03Yeah, this aggressive push into digital terminology makes me wonder about their daily analog lives.
596. 30:04–30:09If they're perfectly translating absolute URL, how are they handling the influx of English
597. 30:09–30:12concepts they encounter at the local Costco or the courthouse or the bank?
598. 30:12–30:13Right.
599. 30:13–30:16The forward notes a really interesting linguistic tension here.
600. 30:16–30:23It states that only a tiny percentage of the Mathili population, less than 3% to 5%, speak
601. 30:23–30:25effective English.
602. 30:25–30:27That statistic is crucial to understand.
603. 30:27–30:31You have a population where very few people are fluent in English.
604. 30:31–30:36Yet despite that low fluency rate, borrowing from English into Mathili at the word level
605. 30:36–30:37is rampant and unavoidable.
606. 30:37–30:39Why is that?
607. 30:39–30:43This is a common sociolinguistic phenomenon across new Indo-Aryan languages.
608. 30:43–30:47When a dominant foreign culture or a centralized government introduces a new bureaucratic legal
609. 30:47–30:53system, a modern allopathic medical system, or new agricultural technologies, the foreign
610. 30:53–30:55words often travel alongside the concepts.
611. 30:55–30:56I see.
612. 30:56–30:58The lexicographers had to make a choice.
613. 30:58–31:01Do we act as purists and ignore these English loan words?
614. 31:01–31:03Or do we capture the reality of how people actually speak?
615. 31:03–31:04They chose reality.
616. 31:04–31:05They did.
617. 31:05–31:10The dictionary captures both the pristine native vocabulary and the nativeized borrowings
618. 31:10–31:12that people use every day.
619. 31:12–31:16You see this cultural bridging vividly in legal and social concepts.
620. 31:16–31:17Very vividly.
621. 31:17–31:22Take the English legal concept of alimony, the financial allowance paid to a spouse after
622. 31:22–31:23a divorce.
623. 31:23–31:27The dictionary translates this as Gozdombiasap.
624. 31:27–31:32If you break down those roots, it literally means an allowance buta for subsistence or
625. 31:32–31:34getting by Gujarat.
626. 31:34–31:39It takes an abstract Western legal term and grounds it in the stark practical reality
627. 31:39–31:45of what the money is actually for surviving. The emotional and moral weight of words is
628. 31:45–31:50also carefully translated. Like what? Well, the word adultery is translated conceptually
629. 31:50–31:57as ej bedis, which carries the deep traditional moral connotations of the culture, not just
630. 31:57–32:02a sterile legal definition. We also see the absorption of modern scientific and medical
631. 32:02–32:08The medical term anesthesia isn't just borrowed, it is translated descriptively as
632. 32:08–32:13cisternsons. A fascinating translation. Which essentially means a state of being
633. 32:13–32:17completely void of consciousness. It explains the medical function of the
634. 32:17–32:22drug perfectly. It does. In biology, amoeba, the single-celled organism, is
635. 32:22–32:28beautifully rendered as estor fulness, literally a one-celled living being.
636. 32:28–32:32And perhaps most importantly, the dictionary
637. 32:32–32:37tailors shared global concepts to the highly specific functional needs of the region.
638. 32:38–32:40Consider how they handle agricultural measurements.
639. 32:40–32:43Yes. The translation for the word acre.
640. 32:43–32:43Right.
641. 32:43–32:47When I look up acre in a standard English dictionary, it usually says something vague like
642. 32:47–32:48a unit of land measurement.
643. 32:48–32:49Exactly.
644. 32:49–32:54But the Vedea dictionary provides exactly what a subsistence farmer or a local landowner needs
645. 32:54–32:58to know. It translates it as 4840 Vera Busmi.
646. 32:58–33:014,840 square yards of land.
647. 33:01–33:03Incredible detail.
648. 33:03–33:04It doesn't just define the word.
649. 33:04–33:07It provides the exact mathematical equivalent required
650. 33:07–33:11to conduct a land transaction or interpret a property deed.
651. 33:11–33:14It is a supremely functional document.
652. 33:14–33:16It is designed to serve the reader
653. 33:16–33:18in their everyday lived experience,
654. 33:18–33:20whether they are reading a doctor's medical chart,
655. 33:20–33:22disputing a land border, or navigating
656. 33:22–33:24a Linux operating system.
657. 33:24–33:26You know, reading a dictionary sequentially,
658. 33:26–33:29which granted is a very strange way to consume a book,
659. 33:29–33:31but we did it for this deep dyes.
660. 33:31–33:32We certainly did.
661. 33:32–33:35It is like reading a surreal alphabetized story
662. 33:35–33:37of human civilization.
663. 33:37–33:40Just in the A section provided in our sources,
664. 33:40–33:42you jump from Abitur, a slaughterhouse,
665. 33:42–33:45translated as AB to Sarmes.
666. 33:45–33:46Right.
667. 33:46–33:47And the very next concept is Abbey,
668. 33:48–33:52a peaceful monastery translated as Cenniel's Jaff.
669. 33:52–33:53Quite a pivot.
670. 33:53–33:56A few words later, you hit Abdicated King,
671. 33:56–33:59giving up the throne translated as Daisy Dezgi.
672. 33:59–34:01From the brutal reality of a slaughterhouse
673. 34:01–34:03to the spiritual quiet of an ashram
674. 34:03–34:05to the political fall of a monarch.
675. 34:05–34:07All sitting right next to each other,
676. 34:07–34:09simply because human beings agreed
677. 34:09–34:13that these concepts happened to start with the letters A and B.
678. 34:13–34:15It is a chaotic, beautiful cross section
679. 34:15–34:16of what it means to be alive.
680. 34:16–34:17It really is.
681. 34:17–34:19This raises an important question though.
682. 34:19–34:21When you step back and consider
683. 34:21–34:23the sheer crushing volume of information
684. 34:23–34:27we've just discussed, from ancient root suffix segmentation
685. 34:27–34:29to the trauma of shifting borders
686. 34:29–34:32to translating 21st century open source software
687. 34:32–34:35to the exact square yardage of an acre.
688. 34:35–34:36It's a lot.
689. 34:36–34:38It is a staggering amount of data.
690. 34:38–34:41So how does a project of this magnitude
691. 34:41–34:44actually get built in the modern era?
692. 34:44–34:46How do three authors manage to pull off
693. 34:46–34:48what used to take royal commissions
694. 34:48–34:51or massive university departments decades to achieve?
695. 34:51–34:54So what does this all mean for you, the listener?
696. 34:54–34:56I think it means we have to fundamentally re-evaluate
697. 34:56–34:58how human knowledge is preserved
698. 34:58–35:00and how languages survive today.
699. 35:00–35:00Absolutely.
700. 35:00–35:02The next time you sit down at your laptop
701. 35:02–35:04and you click the About Mozilla Firefox tab,
702. 35:04–35:07or you right click to add bookmark on your browser,
703. 35:07–35:10I want you to think about the lexicographers out there,
704. 35:10–35:12like Gijendra Thakur and his team.
705. 35:12–35:14The unseen engineers.
706. 35:14–35:17Yes, they are the unseen linguistic engineers,
707. 35:17–35:20ensuring that those exact digital concepts
708. 35:20–35:23exist in every language on earth.
709. 35:23–35:26Languages only survive the meat grinder of globalization
710. 35:26–35:28if they can accurately describe
711. 35:28–35:30the world their speakers live in today,
712. 35:30–35:32not just the world of their ancestors.
713. 35:32–35:34It requires a continuous, active,
714. 35:34–35:37and deeply intentional process of translation.
715. 35:37–35:41Without these tools, without these dedicated lexicographers,
716. 35:41–35:44minority languages will simply fade into silence.
717. 35:44–35:46But the mechanism of how they build these
718. 35:46–35:48lifesaving tools has radically changed.
719. 35:48–35:53and I want to leave you with a final provocative thought drawn directly from the acknowledgement
720. 35:53–35:58section of the Vadeya Dictionary's source text. A very telling section. When the authors are
721. 35:58–36:02giving thanks for the completion of this massive project, they don't just thank other academics
722. 36:02–36:06in ivory towers. No, they don't. They don't just thank university departments or government
723. 36:06–36:12ministries. They give special explicit thanks to the contributors of the Fuel Wiki, the Fedora
724. 36:12–36:17Project, the Wikipedia Project, and the readers of the Veyan online dictionary, which they
725. 36:17–36:21note has been running since 2008 on a sequel server.
726. 36:21–36:26That acknowledgement represents a fundamental seismic shift in the history of lexicography.
727. 36:26–36:27Exactly.
728. 36:27–36:32Historically, from the Acadian Empire to Samuel Johnson, dictionaries were handed down from
729. 36:32–36:33Monhigh.
730. 36:33–36:34Dictated to the masses.
731. 36:34–36:35Right.
732. 36:35–36:40They were written by isolated scholars sitting in dusty rooms acting as the ultimate authority,
733. 36:40–36:43dictating to the masses what the language should be.
734. 36:43–36:44Yeah.
735. 36:44–36:49But this dictionary, this vital lifeline for the 40 million speakers of the Matherly Language
736. 36:49–36:52was aided by open source tech communities.
737. 36:52–36:53Built by the crowd.
738. 36:53–36:55It was built with the help of Wikis.
739. 36:55–37:00It was crowd tested by online readers querying and sequel database for years before it
740. 37:00–37:01went to print.
741. 37:01–37:03Which begs the question.
742. 37:03–37:07Could it be that the future of preserving minority in ancient languages won't rely
743. 37:07–37:11on traditional academic institutions or government mandates at all?
744. 37:11–37:17Could it be that the salvation of human linguistic diversity actually relies on decentralized, open-source,
745. 37:17–37:21hive minds working collaboratively across the internet?
746. 37:21–37:26It suggests that language preservation is no longer just the domain of the elite linguist.
747. 37:26–37:30It is now the domain of the everyday user, the open-source coder, and the digital community
748. 37:30–37:32at large.
749. 37:32–37:36The power to define the language has been handed back to the people who actually speak
750. 37:36–37:37it.
751. 37:37–37:40It is a beautiful and empowering thought.
752. 37:40–37:44if you truly want to capture the soul of a living language, you can't just trap it in
753. 37:44–37:46a static monolithic book anymore.
754. 37:46–37:50You have to open the source code and let the people speaking it write their own future.

Plain text

तो आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आप आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ� आ for mythillie speakers in 1961, the number didn't grow. It didn't even stay the same. It plummeted to 4.9 million. Which is just wild to think about. Right, so you have to ask yourself, how do millions of voices simply vanish from the official government records? I mean, they didn't all suddenly die off. No, of course not. And they didn't wake up one morning with collective amnesia and just forget how to speak their mother tongue. Which tells us that we aren't looking at a biological mystery here, or even a linguistic one really. Okay, so what are we looking at then? We are looking at an administrative vanishing act, basically a language being systemically erased from the map. Wow. And yet today, if you look closely at the Ganttgetic Plain and the foothills of the Himalayas, that language isn't dead at all. Not even close. Right. It is being spoken by an estimated 40 million people today. Yeah, 40 million. Which brings us to the mission for today's deep dive. We are exploring the Vedeja English-Methli Dictionary. the 2012 edition. Yes, authored by Gajendra Thakur, Gajendra Kumar Chah and Panjikar Vidyanan Chah. Because when a language fights for its very existence, a dictionary stops being just a dusty reference book. Pull off the shelf to win a game of Scrabble. Oh, absolutely. It becomes a survival mechanism. Exactly. Okay, let's unpack this because the sheer scale of what we're dealing with here is staggering. It really is. And it challenges everything I thought I knew about how languages are catalogued. I'll I'll admit when I first picked up the source material, specifically the four word written by Professor Udayan Narayanas saying, I went in with a very, a very Western bias. I think a lot of people do. Yeah. You think of dictionary making and you picture guys in powdered wigs, right? Right, like Samuel Johnson. Exactly. Samuel Johnson in London in 1755 or Robert Codrie writing a table alphabetical in 1604. You imagine them sitting by candlelight, inventing the concept of alphabetizing words. It is a very common misconception. I mean, we are taught that the Enlightenment era in Europe birthed the modern encyclopedia and the dictionary, but Professor Singh's foreword provides a profound reality check for that worldview. English, as a distinct codified language, is actually a relatively recent phenomenon on the global timeline. How reason are we talking? Well, to put it sharply into perspective, the oldest available written treatise in in Mithili was authored by a scholar named Juryo Tirishwara. Okay. And he was writing this during the exact same period that Jeffrey Chaucer was just beginning to establish the literary prestige of Middle English with the Canterbury tale. Oh, wow. So Mithili's literary roots run parallel to English. Exactly. But the human tradition of actually making dictionaries, that predates English by millennia. Right. Because the foreword traces this back to the erstwhile Akkadian empire to the city of Ebla in modern day Syria. And the timeline here is, I mean, it's hard to infat him. We're talking about 2300 BC. It's ancient. But I'm trying to picture the lived reality of that. I can understand why I need a dictionary in 2026. I'm trying to read a complicated article or, you know, learn a new software term. Sure. But why did a civilization over 4,000 years ago need a bilingual Sumerian Acadian word list? Were they just casually studying foreign languages? No. more pragmatic than that, and in many ways much more urgent than casual study. You really have to look at the geopolitical shift happening in Mesopotamia around 2300 BC. Okay, set the scene for us. So the Sumerian civilization, which had invented one of the earliest forms of writing cuneiform, was being culturally and politically absorbed by the Akkadian-speaking empire. Okay, so a hostile takeover basically. Pretty much. Sumerian was slowly becoming a dead-spoken language, but it remained the prestigious language of law, religion, and ancient administration. Oh, so all the important documents were still in Sumerian? Exactly. If you were an Akkadian scribe, a judge, or a priest, you needed to know exactly what the ancient Sumerian contracts and hymns meant. So they created these clay tablets, they etched Sumerian logograms on one side, and the phonetic Akkadian translations on the other. It was just an administrative necessity to keep their society functioning. So it wasn't about expanding their vocabulary. It was about preventing total systemic collapse as power shifted hands. Exactly. Because you lose the translation, you lose the ancient laws. Precisely. And this instinct to catalog and preserve appears everywhere. I mean the source material mentions the Ur-a-hu-bulu glossary from the 2nd millennium BC. Right, which was a massive encyclopedia of legal and agricultural terms. Risk. And then you move forward to the Greek tradition in the 1st century CE, where Apollonius the Sophist was cataloging Homeric vocabulary. Now I assume that was because by the first century, Homer's ancient Greek from the Iliad already sounded archaic to them, like us trying to read Shakespeare today. Exactly. They needed a glossary just to understand their own foundational myths. That makes total sense. And you see similar preservation efforts in the East too. The Chinese tradition stretches back to the third century BC. Wow. And the Japanese compiled the Nina Glossary of Chinese characters in 682 CE. Their oldest existing complete dictionary, the Tenre Ban Shimegi, dates back to 835 CE. That's incredible. And we certainly cannot ignore the Arabic world, which was compiling monumental, exhaustive, general-purpose dictionaries like the Lisanal Arab in the 13th century, long before Samuel Johnson was even born. So this global obsession with word catching is universal. But Professor Singh makes a very distinct argument about the Indian tradition of lexicography. He does, yes. He says it wasn't just driven by legal administration or translating foreign languages for trade. The motivation was deeply spiritual, almost to the point of being mathematical. Yeah, the Indian tradition is a fascinating divergence in the history of linguistics. In ancient India, the primary driver for grammatical and lexicographical works was the absolute flawless preservation of Vedic literature. Right, the Vedas. Yes, the Vedas were oral traditions long before they were written down, and their power, their spiritual efficacy, essentially relied on exact pronunciation and exact morphological understanding. Okay, I want to pause on that word for a second, because the forward dies into some heavy linguistic concepts here. It does get quite technical. Yeah, like morphological understanding and morphophonological theories. For the listener who hasn't taken a graduate linguistic seminar, can we get a quick, like I'm five on what these ancient Indian scholars were actually doing to the language? Sure. Think of language like a complex Lego structure. Okay, Legos, I'm with you. If you just look at the Finnish castle, that is the whole sentence. But what scholars like Panini did thousands of years ago was take the castle completely apart. Oh, they deconstructed it. Exactly. They didn't just define what a word meant. They broke every single word down into its absolute fundamental building blocks. They isolated the root of the word, the central action or concept, and then they isolated the suffix or prefix that gave it tense, or gender, or plurality. So morphology is the study of how those Lego blocks fit together to build meaning. Exactly. And phonology is the study of how the sounds change when you snap those blocks together. Penini and his contemporaries were basically developing exhaustive mathematical formulas algorithms essentially. That predicted exactly how Sanskrit words were formed. Okay, so they were treating human language like a piece of software code. That is an excellent analogy, yeah. They were early data scientists. They absolutely were. They realized that you can't just memorize every single word in existence. No, it's impossible. But if you can understand the deep underlying rules, the root suffix segmentations, You can generate or decode any word perfectly. This tradition of deep structural analysis really laid the groundwork for Indian lexicography. Which brings us to the actual dictionaries they produced. The foreword mentions the Negantu from 700 BC. Yes. And that categorized words based on synonymy and homonymy. So words that mean the same thing or sound the same. Correct. And then we get to the heavy hitter. Amarasimas Amarakosa from the sixth century AD. A monumental text. The text notes that this was a dictionary of synonyms, but here's the detail that just stopped me in my tracks. Oh, the commentaries. Yes. The catalogus catalogorum, which I gather is this giant registry of Sanskrit manuscripts, lists at least 40 different commentaries written solely on the America Cosa. At least 40, yes. 40 commentaries on a dictionary. I mean, I can understand scholars spending centuries writing commentaries on a religious text or major philosophical treatise. Why are generations of brilliant scholars obsessing over a thesaurus? It seems totally baffling to a modern reader, right? Because we treat a dictionary like a quick search engine. Yeah, you just look up the spelling and close the tab. Exactly. But you have to understand the pedagogical culture of classical India. The Amerikosa wasn't a book you kept on a desk to consult occasionally. It was a text you memorized. Memorized. The whole thing. Yes. It was written in verse, in specific meters, specifically so it could be chanted and memorized. When a student memorized the Americosa, they were essentially downloading a massive highly organized ontological database of the universe Right into their brain. Oh, wow. So it wasn't just an alphabetical list of words It was a map of how they categorized reality precisely it categorized the world into sections the heavens the earth time Human anatomy the underworld that's incredible. So when later scholars wrote commentaries on it They weren't just arguing about spelling They were debating nuance, etymology, and how different philosophical schools interpreted those core concepts. I see. The Americosa became the gravitational center of intellectual life in ancient India. It spawned an entire ecosystem of similar lexicons over the following centuries. From the 11th century Namamalika to the 17th century Siddhishth Abdullaynava. Okay, so I'm looking at this immense, mathematically precise, ancient tradition of Indian lexicography. and it brings me back to my source question. The delay of the Mathili dictionary. Right. If the tradition is so robust and the academic machinery for organizing language has existed in India for millennia, why did a comprehensive modern English Mathili dictionary like the Videha take until 2012 to finally materialize? What's fascinating here is that the delay has absolutely nothing to do with a lack of intellectual capability among Mathili scholars. Okay. Nor is it a sign of a weak literary tradition. The delay is entirely symptomatic of the incredibly complex, shifting and often hostile reality of the Mothili language's geographic and political environment. Because language doesn't exist in a vacuum. Exactly. You cannot separate a dictionary from the sociopolitical reality of the people who actually speak the language. Right. And I was trying to picture this geography based on the source text. If Mothili is surrounded by massive, dominant languages like Hindi and Bengali, my initial hypothesis was that the physical borders of the Methyli speaking region must be incredibly rigid. Like a fortress. Yeah, exactly. Like they must have lived in a very isolated protected pocket to keep the language distinct for all these centuries. It is actually the exact opposite. Really? Yes. The physical borders of the Methyli speaking region, a cultural area known as Methila, are profoundly fluid, both naturally and politically. See it how? Well geographically, it spans the Gengetic Plain in the Indian state of Bihar, stretching up into the Tari region at the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal. Right. The text said about 14% of Nepal's population speaks Mithali, which is huge. It is. It also reaches into parts of the state of Harkin. But defining exactly where Mithila begins and ends is like trying to draw a line in the sand during a windstorm. And the sources highlight a natural factor that just blew my mind regarding this, the Koshy River. Ah, yes. The Koshy River. It runs right through the heart of this region, and historically it is notoriously unstable. The text notes that has changed its course seven times in the last 200 years. Yes, it's actually known as the Sorrow of Bihar because of the devastating floods. But linguistically, imagine the chaos of that. If a river is your natural border, and that river moves a hundred miles to the west over a century dividing villages, separating communities, scrambling trade routes, how do you even map a linguistic demographic. You really can't. The natural volatility of the Kershi River is a perfect metaphor for the political volatility of the region, too. What do you mean? The administrative boundaries of districts in Bihar have been redrawn continuously by the government. A region that was once broadly defined by five large districts was later topped up and split into 31 smaller districts. Oh wow. And out of those 31, about 10 are considered the core Mothly speech area. So you have a major natural landmark that keeps moving and you have political bureaucrats constantly redrawing the map lines underneath the actual population And when you constantly move the borders the data gets distorted exactly which brings us back to that Unbelievable mystery from the intro the census numbers right the missing millions. Let's look at exactly what happened between 1891 and 1961 because it's one of the most glaring statistical anomalies I've ever seen well as we discussed in 1891 the renowned linguist George Abraham Greerson Conducted exhaustive surveys and estimated the number of Mathili speakers to be about 9.2 million Right and Greerson's work is considered pretty rock-solid isn't it? Oh highly respected his linguistic survey of India is still foundational for scholars today. He was meticulous. Okay, so we have a solid baseline 9.2 million speakers in 1891 then we arrive at the 1961 census now keep in mind India's population has grown tremendously since 1891. Massively. But the official government census records only about 4.9 million Mothilli speakers. It just doesn't make any mathematical sense. It doesn't. And then, jumping forward again, the 2001 census suddenly shows a massive spike back up to over 1.2 crore, which is 12 million. Okay. Yet, Professor Singh, in his forward to the dictionary, looks at the demographic realities and estimates the actual number of speakers today is likely closer to 40 million. 40 million. That is more than the entire population of Canada. How do you misplace a population the size of Canada in the official data? Well, according to the detailed historical analysis presented in Professor Singh's foreword, this tremendous fluctuation is not a natural demographic event at all. So what is it? It points directly to a historical sociopolitical dynamic. First, you have to understand that This region is a highly multilingual melting pot. Maitley doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is surrounded by 12 other languages. Wait, 12 in one region? Yes, you have Wujpuri and Magahi, an immediate proximity with Hindi acting as a superimposed dominant administrative language across all three communities. Okay, that sounds complicated enough. And it gets more complicated. You also have Bengali, Nepali, Urdu, and several Austro-Azerianic languages like Santali and Mundari, all coexisting in rubbing shoulders. So it's incredibly diverse. But how does that explain the missing millions in the census data? The text notes a very specific and highly controversial claim regarding these census numbers. Now, we're just reporting what the source material states here. Of course. Let's just look at the arguments presented in the text. According to Professor Singh's analysis, there was a historical disinformation campaign spread by certain groups with the express goal of classifying Mathili not as a distinct language, but merely as a dialect of Hindi. Okay, and what is the text claim was the motivation for that? The forward argues that the goal was to artificially inflate the official number of Hindi speakers in the national census data, thereby consolidating political and cultural power for the Hindi speaking lobby. I see, because if Mathili is officially just a dialect, then all those millions of Mathili speakers get counted as Hindi speakers in the ledger. Exactly. The math shifts in their favor. The text points out that part of this narrative relied on pushing a myth that Mathili was a language only spoken by elite Brahmans. Oh, to make it seem like a tiny minority. Right. Making it seem like a niche, upper caste quirk rather than a mass language. And how does the source text address that claim? Professor Singh directly contradicts this in the forward. He cites the actual caste composition of the region and notes the incredibly high percentage of Muslims in the area who actively return, Mithili, as their mother tongue on the census. Okay. It is a fascinating historical claim to read through. Professor Singh's foreword lays out a very clear case that sociopolitical maneuvering, whether through the physical drawing of district lines or the academic classification of a language, has a massive real-world impact. A huge impact. Because when a language is not constitutionally recognized by the state or when it is forcibly reclassified as a sub-dialect of something else, it effectively disappears from the official reality. Yes. Even if 40 million people are speaking in their kitchens, at the markets, and to their children. And the ripple effects of that official marginalization are profound, especially when we talk about dictionary making. Right, getting back to the dictionary. If the state doesn't recognize your language, there is no official funding for it. There are no university grants to build comprehensive linguistic tools. No government support. None. mandate to teach it in schools. The language is basically starved of the institutional infrastructure that allows it to standardize and modernize. Here's where it gets really interesting, though. If you look at human history, usually when a community is denied constitutional rights for decades, and their numbers are systematically suppressed in official censuses, the language dies. It fades away. Yeah, it gets crushed under the weight of the dominant culture. The youth abandon it for the language of upward mobility. But Professor Singh makes a beautifully counterintuitive observation of the forward. He does. He calls this period of intense marginalization a boon in disguise for Methili. It is a profound testament to the resilience of human culture. He argues that the denial of recognition didn't crush the Methili spirit at all. It ignited it. It sparked a fire. Exactly. It added an incredible vigor to their literary and cultural activity. When the community felt their core identity was under threat of erasure, they didn't assimilate. They doubled down. Right. The text notes that this is the era when they produced massive amounts of literature. Yes. And it wasn't just words on a page either. The same cultural defiance pushed their visual arts onto the global stage. Madhubani painting, which is also known as Mathila art. Oh, those are stunning. incredibly intricate geometric vibrant paintings that originated from women decorating the mud walls of their homes. Right, the domestic art. Suddenly it exploded. They transitioned to paper and canvas, reached the national market in India and eventually became internationally renowned. The community essentially said, if you won't recognize us on your census forms, we will make our culture so undeniably brilliant that you cannot ignore us. It is the ultimate cultural defense mechanism and eventually that sheer stubborn perseverance actually paid off. It did. After decades of struggle, Mathili was finally included in the eighth schedule of the Indian Constitution in 2003. Which is huge. Yes. This granted it the official recognition at the national level that it had long been denied. And that constitutional victory completely changes the game, right? Because you aren't just fighting for survival in the shadows anymore, you have a seat at the table. Exactly. But with official status comes an entirely new, daunting set of challenges. Like what? Well, once you have constitutional recognition, the users of the language, the students, the civil servants, the journalists, they start demanding modern tools. Oh, I see. It is no longer enough to just have ancient poetry. They need online easines. They need searchable dictionaries. They need it to work in the modern world. Right. They need mobile glossaries and automated question and answer systems. They need a way to interface with the rapidly digitizing 21st century entirely in their mother tongue. Which brings us to the actual physical or rather digital and physical creation of the Vidae English-Mathili dictionary. Yes, the dictionary itself. How do you standardize a language that has survived primarily through deep literary traditions and local spoken dialects while swimming in a sea of 12 other languages? You have to build a bridge. A massive, heavily engineered bridge. Let's look at the anatomy of this dictionary because the authors just through together a quick phrase book here. Not at all. The first thing you realize when you dive into the mechanics of the Deja is that it is an exhaustive, rigorous, linguistic undertaking. Right. But before we analyze the phonetic translations or the technical vocabulary, I think it is crucial to look at page Roman numeral five of the source document. Dedication page. Yes. I'm so glad you brought this up. Because when we look at these massive monumental reference books. We tend to view them as cold academic objects. We do. We forget the humans behind it. Exactly. We forget the actual human beings who sat at a desk day after day, year after year, typing out thousands of entries. And the dedication page of the Vedea grounds this massive academic achievement in deep, intimate, multi-generational love. It really does. Kajendra Thakur dedicates his work to his father, his mother, his wife, pretty and his son Alum and daughter Asta. Beautiful. The agenda Kamarajah dedicates it to the memory of his father, grandfather and great grandfather. Panjikur Vida Manita dedicates it to his parents and his wife. It reminds you that this isn't just an academic exercise for these men. No, not at all. They are building a linguistic house for their children to live in and honoring the ancestors who kept the language alive in the dark times. It is a labor of profound devotion. And that level of care translates directly into the technical execution of the dictionary. Now so? They understood that to make this tool useful for the future, they couldn't cut corners. They didn't just provide Mathili equivalents for English words. They engineered a dual-script interface with complex pronunciation guides. Oh right. They actually created an international phonetic Mathili alphabet. And they presented the Mathili words in both the widely used Devanagari script, which is what Hindi and Sanskrit use, and the native mytholokshara script, also known as Tirhuta. I spent a lot of time looking at this phonetic guide in the source text. It is incredibly detailed. It is. They use the international phonetic alphabet, the IPA symbols. So you aren't just guessing how to say a word based on English letters. You see the phonetic schwa symbol, the wam to denote that soft mmm sound. You see notations for elongated vowels like I and you. It is a serious, mathematically rigorous tool. It provides absolute phonetic clarity. Yeah. If a non-native speaker or a young person in the diaspora who never heard their grandparents speak wants to learn exactly how to form these specific sounds in their mouth, the data is right there. It's all laid out for them. But you know, the true marvel of the dictionary reveals itself when you look at the actual vocabulary they chose to include. Absolutely. This text provides us with a cross-section of words starting with the letter A. And the sheer staggering variety of human experience they are trying to capture under one letter is a feat of lexical engineering. It really is. You have the foundational, everyday words of human existence. Abdomen is translated anatomically as... Pain. Or face. Basic biology. You have concepts of spatial awareness, like the word A-back, maybe backward or taken by surprise. They translate it beautifully as Virvice. Very functional. But then as you are scrolling down the A's, you stumble across a word that is so hyper-specific it feels like it fell out of a different universe. Alpern stock. Yes. An Alpern stock. I mean. A long wooden stick with an iron spike at the bottom used historically by mountaineers in the Alps. Right. I was looking at this thinking, how on earth do you translate Alpern stock into a language spoken primarily on the flat, gangetic planes. It's a great question. And the dictionary doesn't just invent a nonsense word, and it doesn't just borrow the English word wholesale. No, they don't. It provides this beautifully descriptive, highly functional phrase of Saras's, or Saras's braised the one she does once this is Berozia, which is a mouthful. It is. But if you break that down literally, it translates to a stick with an iron handle that comes in handy during mountaineering. It is a perfect example of descriptive translation. The lexicographers are demonstrating that Mephili doesn't have a conceptual ceiling. It has the syntactic flexibility to describe absolutely anything on the planet, even an obscure European mountaineering tool using its own native vocabulary. but while the descriptive translation of an outprint stock is charming, there is a much more aggressive, deliberate pattern in vocabulary they chose to include. Ah, yes. The tech terminology. Yes. Intermixed with ancient words, religious words, and agricultural words, there is a massive injection of highly technical 21st century computer terminology. It's very prominent. I mean deeply specific software engineering concepts. Why are the authors dedicating so much space to computer science in a dictionary for a language that traces its roots back to the 14th century. Well, if we connect this to the bigger picture, this specific vocabulary choice is the ultimate realization of Professor Singh's point about needing modern tools. Okay, how so? Languages die when they become archaic. If a language can only be used to discuss poetry, religion, and farming, but cannot be used to discuss the internet, software, or modern medicine, the speakers will compartmentalize it. Oh, I see. They will use methyli at home, but they will switch to English or Hindi the second they sit at a computer. Right, because they don't have the words for it. Exactly. Over time, the language shrinks into the domestic sphere and dies. The authors of the Vidae are actively retrofitting Mathili for the digital age to prevent that. They are declaring that Mathili can and must speak digital. They are aggressively claiming their space in the modern economy. Oh, yes they are. Because look at these entries. They actually have a translation for about G-ANIO, which is a highly specific open source desktop environment for Linux operating system. Yeah, that's incredibly niche. They translate it as non-justjayer. They have an entry for absolute URL. They translate it as NURS2SETCHET, defining it as an internet signal with a domain name. The linguistic precision required to do this is remarkable. Consider the word algorithm. Okay. It is a fundamental concept in mathematics and computer science. The dictionary translates it as Corona Vidi. They aren't just transliterating the English word algorithm into my Philly script. No, they're building it from scratch. Exactly. They are reaching back into an incantant, Sanskrit mathematical roots to construct a native equivalent. Vidi relates to a rule, method, or procedure. Kalana relates to calculation or counting. A method of calculation and algorithm. That is brilliant. They are using the exact same root suffix mastery that Penini used thousands of years ago, but applying it to modern software design. It's a direct lineage. It is deeply practical too. They have entries for database management, active database, they have network security terms, access control list. Right. They even translate fundamental user interface commands. The button you click to add, remove software is translated directly as SunToonViz and Vasey2Gone. It immediately familiarizes the digital environment. When you look at an operating system and see active window, the window you are currently interacting with on your screen, the dictionary translates it phonetically as karashloh, krashal, meaning active or functional. And I saw analog computer rendered as some of the Drescha. Beautiful. It is poetry. Yeah. They are taking sterile English tech jargon and rendering it with the gravity and precision of ancient Indo-Aryan roots. It really elevates the language. And the implication of this is massive. It means a young student growing up in Darbanga, or a teenager in the Tarai region, doesn't have to check their cultural identity at the door when they decide to learn coding or pursue computer science. No, the vocabulary already exists. It is waiting for them. The dictionary validates the language as a vehicle for the future, not just a museum piece of the past. It creates a seamless cultural tapestry. But you know, the dictionary doesn't just focus on the high tech future. No. It is also a deeply honest reflection of the messy, hybridized reality of how a methili speaker navigates the modern world on a daily basis. Yeah, this aggressive push into digital terminology makes me wonder about their daily analog lives. If they're perfectly translating absolute URL, how are they handling the influx of English concepts they encounter at the local Costco or the courthouse or the bank? Right. The forward notes a really interesting linguistic tension here. It states that only a tiny percentage of the Mathili population, less than 3% to 5%, speak effective English. That statistic is crucial to understand. You have a population where very few people are fluent in English. Yet despite that low fluency rate, borrowing from English into Mathili at the word level is rampant and unavoidable. Why is that? This is a common sociolinguistic phenomenon across new Indo-Aryan languages. When a dominant foreign culture or a centralized government introduces a new bureaucratic legal system, a modern allopathic medical system, or new agricultural technologies, the foreign words often travel alongside the concepts. I see. The lexicographers had to make a choice. Do we act as purists and ignore these English loan words? Or do we capture the reality of how people actually speak? They chose reality. They did. The dictionary captures both the pristine native vocabulary and the nativeized borrowings that people use every day. You see this cultural bridging vividly in legal and social concepts. Very vividly. Take the English legal concept of alimony, the financial allowance paid to a spouse after a divorce. The dictionary translates this as Gozdombiasap. If you break down those roots, it literally means an allowance buta for subsistence or getting by Gujarat. It takes an abstract Western legal term and grounds it in the stark practical reality of what the money is actually for surviving. The emotional and moral weight of words is also carefully translated. Like what? Well, the word adultery is translated conceptually as ej bedis, which carries the deep traditional moral connotations of the culture, not just a sterile legal definition. We also see the absorption of modern scientific and medical The medical term anesthesia isn't just borrowed, it is translated descriptively as cisternsons. A fascinating translation. Which essentially means a state of being completely void of consciousness. It explains the medical function of the drug perfectly. It does. In biology, amoeba, the single-celled organism, is beautifully rendered as estor fulness, literally a one-celled living being. And perhaps most importantly, the dictionary tailors shared global concepts to the highly specific functional needs of the region. Consider how they handle agricultural measurements. Yes. The translation for the word acre. Right. When I look up acre in a standard English dictionary, it usually says something vague like a unit of land measurement. Exactly. But the Vedea dictionary provides exactly what a subsistence farmer or a local landowner needs to know. It translates it as 4840 Vera Busmi. 4,840 square yards of land. Incredible detail. It doesn't just define the word. It provides the exact mathematical equivalent required to conduct a land transaction or interpret a property deed. It is a supremely functional document. It is designed to serve the reader in their everyday lived experience, whether they are reading a doctor's medical chart, disputing a land border, or navigating a Linux operating system. You know, reading a dictionary sequentially, which granted is a very strange way to consume a book, but we did it for this deep dyes. We certainly did. It is like reading a surreal alphabetized story of human civilization. Just in the A section provided in our sources, you jump from Abitur, a slaughterhouse, translated as AB to Sarmes. Right. And the very next concept is Abbey, a peaceful monastery translated as Cenniel's Jaff. Quite a pivot. A few words later, you hit Abdicated King, giving up the throne translated as Daisy Dezgi. From the brutal reality of a slaughterhouse to the spiritual quiet of an ashram to the political fall of a monarch. All sitting right next to each other, simply because human beings agreed that these concepts happened to start with the letters A and B. It is a chaotic, beautiful cross section of what it means to be alive. It really is. This raises an important question though. When you step back and consider the sheer crushing volume of information we've just discussed, from ancient root suffix segmentation to the trauma of shifting borders to translating 21st century open source software to the exact square yardage of an acre. It's a lot. It is a staggering amount of data. So how does a project of this magnitude actually get built in the modern era? How do three authors manage to pull off what used to take royal commissions or massive university departments decades to achieve? So what does this all mean for you, the listener? I think it means we have to fundamentally re-evaluate how human knowledge is preserved and how languages survive today. Absolutely. The next time you sit down at your laptop and you click the About Mozilla Firefox tab, or you right click to add bookmark on your browser, I want you to think about the lexicographers out there, like Gijendra Thakur and his team. The unseen engineers. Yes, they are the unseen linguistic engineers, ensuring that those exact digital concepts exist in every language on earth. Languages only survive the meat grinder of globalization if they can accurately describe the world their speakers live in today, not just the world of their ancestors. It requires a continuous, active, and deeply intentional process of translation. Without these tools, without these dedicated lexicographers, minority languages will simply fade into silence. But the mechanism of how they build these lifesaving tools has radically changed. and I want to leave you with a final provocative thought drawn directly from the acknowledgement section of the Vadeya Dictionary's source text. A very telling section. When the authors are giving thanks for the completion of this massive project, they don't just thank other academics in ivory towers. No, they don't. They don't just thank university departments or government ministries. They give special explicit thanks to the contributors of the Fuel Wiki, the Fedora Project, the Wikipedia Project, and the readers of the Veyan online dictionary, which they note has been running since 2008 on a sequel server. That acknowledgement represents a fundamental seismic shift in the history of lexicography. Exactly. Historically, from the Acadian Empire to Samuel Johnson, dictionaries were handed down from Monhigh. Dictated to the masses. Right. They were written by isolated scholars sitting in dusty rooms acting as the ultimate authority, dictating to the masses what the language should be. Yeah. But this dictionary, this vital lifeline for the 40 million speakers of the Matherly Language was aided by open source tech communities. Built by the crowd. It was built with the help of Wikis. It was crowd tested by online readers querying and sequel database for years before it went to print. Which begs the question. Could it be that the future of preserving minority in ancient languages won't rely on traditional academic institutions or government mandates at all? Could it be that the salvation of human linguistic diversity actually relies on decentralized, open-source, hive minds working collaboratively across the internet? It suggests that language preservation is no longer just the domain of the elite linguist. It is now the domain of the everyday user, the open-source coder, and the digital community at large. The power to define the language has been handed back to the people who actually speak it. It is a beautiful and empowering thought. if you truly want to capture the soul of a living language, you can't just trap it in a static monolithic book anymore. You have to open the source code and let the people speaking it write their own future.

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