Modern science has created around a million words in European languages. As India gained independence it became imperative to create terms for adminis tration, industry, humanistic and scientific disciplines. It was a continuation of a long tradition of linguistic creativity. This book is a collection of the writeups of Prof. Raghu Vira who was the prime 'maker of Indian words. The source languages of European terminologies Greek and Latin shared the same grammatical basis of word-formation from roots with prefixes and suffixes like Sanskrit the historical source language of India. Linguistic nihilism of India's leadership had to be convinced that new words have to be coined continuously as research discovers new facts and concepts. Language as a process of evolution, creation of Japanese and Chinese terminologies, the linguistic reform in Turkish, rejuvenation of Hebrew, the development of Hindi as the official language, principles of coining Indian terms, the art of translation, improvement in Indian terms due to scientific advances, and several facets of the linguistic revolution in newly liberated countries can be read in this book in the very words of Prof. Raghuvira the creator of India's macrocosm of linguistic evolution. Recently the Oxford University Press has named Samvidhaan as the "Oxford Hindi word of 2019". It was created by Prof. Raghuvira in 1946, thrilled the President of the Constituent Assembly of India in 1947 and it became the word for Constitution, sharing its prefix sam with the cognate Lain con in Constitution. The book is a thrilling narrative of India's logos, with parallels from other lands.
Prof. Lokesh Chandra is currently the Director of the International Academy of Indian Culture which is a premier research institution for Asian cultures. He was the President of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR). He is a well- known historian and a renowned scholar of Tibetan, Mongolian and Sino-Japanese Buddhism. He has also served as a member of the Indian Parliament. In 2006 he was recognized with India's Padma Bhushan award.
He is the son of the world-renowned scholar of Oriental Studies and Linguistics Prof. Raghuvira. He was born in 1927, obtained his Master's degree in 1947 from the Punjab University at Lahore, and followed it with a Doctorate in Literature and Philosophy from the State University of Utrecht (Netherlands) in 1950. Starting with an understanding of the most ancient of India's spiritual expression enshrined in the Vedic tradition, he has moved on to the interlocution between India, Tibet, Mongolia, China, Korea, Japan, South East Asia, and the Indo-European languages. He has studied over twenty languages of the world. He has to his credit 605 works and text editions.
This book is the love of my father Prof. Raghuvira for the languages of his land, the gift of his mother and father, the intellectual achievements of his millennia, and his country's in the new paradigms of sciences and technologies. had to find a An India emerging into quest of ascent. freedom after centuries new instrumentation in the creative reality of language. Self-alienation became dominant at the dawn of freedom and a national language could not play a natural role. The true life of a national language is centripetal and not centrifugal. In his Dichtung und Wahrheit 3.11 Goethe speaks of entering into the mind of the foreigner. New accents on external values of English banished our languages which could have become a rejuvenation of India's discoveries in pure sciences and applied technologies. Higher scientific thinking ascends into abstract technicalities. Indian languages would have brought new light from their heritage to bear upon abstract scientific thought. The logos would have become ours. Prof. Raghuvira wrote sans end to see that our languages get their natural place in national life, succeeded to provide equivalents for the endless vocabulary of scientific disciplines, and showed the immense linguistic powers of our source language. This book gathers his clarion calls to clothe modern and trans-modern expressions in historically inherited language fluencies. He bequeathed to his people 150,000 words in the conviction.
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