While the EFC document of the CIIL focuses on the harmonious growth and development of all Indian languages, and the need for coordinated effort and interdisciplinary. research in that effort, the EFC document for setting up. the Regional .Language Centres spells out a-conscious plan for making the country multilingual by effectively promoting the three language formula and. taking deliberate measures to overcome the paucity of men and materials in this quest This, :it is reasoned, would be. essential for creative education and effective democratic functioning of the nation. As a result, for the last four decades over 12000 personnel- mostly school teachers (both from government schools and ‘private schools) and others aspiring to. become teachers or researchers in language-have received year long training in the seven regional language centres in‘20 of the 22 . languages listed: under the 8:schedule, making it-one of the largest second language: learning programmes anywhere in the world. It has.also- offered several lessons to all of us and created a series.of strategic pedagogical materials connecting one Indian language with another, as also connecting each of :them with the two official languages of the Indian Union-Hindi and English. Some of these materials need to. become public to ease the task. of learners.
For those learners.setting to learn another language, it is often a-matter of. learning new ways of expressing the words they know in their own language, and even though experts may tell them that .is nowhere near sufficient, they would: concede acquisition of vocabulary is the core element of language learning for ‘each word has its own history’. What reinforces the learner’s perception is the success: . with which he is greeted in this quest for discovery of equivalents, almost as:if:each language awaits its translation in another, and as if the meaning is in an existential plane of its own. Words seek connections with this ‘realm of propositions’ and learners expect to connect words with words, and in their becoming bilinguals connect one language with the other.
Dictionaries are an invaluable component of learning and teaching a language. Bilingual dictionaries seek to create that equivalence by equating form with meaning on one hand and one form with another on the other. Just as dictionary makers remind us that there are no true synonyms, they would also caution us that the equivalence they have posited between languages may let you down in usage as different contexts may demand different equivalents of meaning, or one word in one language may demand more than one equivalent in the other. It is therefore imperative that for each lexical entry the syntagmatic, paradigmatic,semantic and pragmatic issues are also attended to by the dictionary maker.
The purpose of this dictionary is not that of a monolingual learner who may want to use it as a frame of reference to know more about the pronunciation, grammar or even historical origin of the entries or check the collocations. It is from the view point of the bilingual who may want to have a bidirectional approach to seek connections and maximize the transfer of learning. In this case the ‘Malayalam learner’-in the two senses of a Malayalam speaker learning another language (in this case English or A cognate Indian language) or a learner of Malayalam who is a speaker of another language-, both shall stand to gain with this bilingual product. Dr. Saratchandran Nair with years of experience in teaching the language and being constantly involved with all the four southern languages has begun a pioneering effort to put on record these dictionaries of pairs of languages to aid the task of learning and teaching. Thus we have Malayalam paired with three cognate languages-Tamil, Telugu and Kannada- as well as another bidirectional effort linking Malayalam with English. The fact that literary and spoken forms are together brought out in these editions-especially in his Malayalam -English Kannada dictionary- has made the effort even more noteworthy. We have no doubt these will prove useful for all and in time to come as they are shaped by the experience of its users will acquire revised forms and become a richer resource.
We hope all will value these new linguistic products in an increasingly modernizing nation, where social mobility will need enhanced competence in other languages. In keeping with increasing role of technology in our lives, the dictionaries are also being brought out as CDs.
CIIL takes this opportunity to thank Dr Nair in coming forward to further promote the cause of learning Indian languages on the eve of his retirement from government service. From public service he shall never retire for he is too deeply involved with that...that is his mission in life.......and we can only wish him the very best.
The second Language Learners Dictionary entitled Bilingual Bidirectional Electronic Dictionary in Malayalam-English (BBEDME) is prepared for the benefit of any non - native speaker of Malayalam learning Malayalam. It could be used as a quick reference material in both Malayalam and English. Whenever a second language learner starts learning a new language,after having acquired the basic skills,one of the skills,he/she would be lacking would be in the use of appropriate words in the appropriate context and in case of doubt ,one has to depend on a Malayalam-English Dictionary and English-Malayalam Dictionary, which have been prepared for the benefit of native speakers learning English or Malayalam,that does not mean that the present dictionary does not preclude others from using this particular dictionary . However this dictionary has been compiled with a view to cater to the needs of second language learners,whose mother tongue is not Malayalam and this one is the base material used in a series of Bilingual-Bidirectional Electronic dictionaries prepared under the direction of the same author such as Malayalam-Tamil, Tamil-Malayalam,Malayalam-Kannada,Kannada- Malayalam,Malayalam-Telugu,Telugu-Malayalam as a major project undertaken by the Southern Regional Language Centre, Central Institute of Indian languages, Mysore, India under the aegis of the Ministry of Human Resources Development, Govt. of India,New Delhi.
General issues: The Institute and Centers have been vested with the responsibility of preparing innovative teaching and learning materials in languages and the Southern Regional language Centre is vested with the responsibility of teaching adult learners in Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. My experience of teaching Malayalam to Indian students, with different mother tongues such as Assamese, Bengali, Oriya, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Marathi, Manipuri etc have taught me the fundamental issues concerning several Indian languages,because we have a cultural similarity at the core of the languages but at the same time diversity on the periphery, probably the Indian essence is present in the core vocabulary,say for instance the kinship terms if seen across the languages would be almost the same. At the same time we are unable to find words for half-brother, half-sister, living-in-relationships or single mother or house husbands, which have become the order of the day in English and several European languages. My venture into the present dictionary making was sown,when I started working on the Indo-Japanese dictionary project way back in 1993-94 on the Japanese - English Malayalam,working with, Prof.T.Nara, Prof.Norihiko Uchida,Prof. Hiroshi Yamashita of Sendai University, all of them affiliated Institiute of Languages of Asian and African studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo and also ably supported by the then Director,Prof. E. Annamalai and Prof. Francis Ekka. The basic vocabulary of 2000 equivalent words of Japanese - English Malayalam have been prepared and submitted then. It has Japanese Entry word with English equivalents and Malayalam equivalents and phonemic and phonetic transcriptions and it was also a computer assisted and computer applications were in a nascent stage in our Indian languages.Even though Xerox copies of that material were available and never got published. I had vigorously pursued that study and somehow due to various reasons the works were not completed. Later I had built up 12,000 vocabulary of Malayalam- English Dictionary by expanding the 25 semantic fields on which the Japanese Malayalam dictionary was prepared taking into consideration the cultural contexts of Malayalam and also comparing with the then dictionaries in Malayalam and leaving aside the old archaic words in Malayalam and looking more into the contemporary Malayalam. However some lexical entries of archaic nature and also the dialects of the lexicographer or the assistants, who were involved in preparing the material which might have crept in, have been untouched as they also represent a part of Malayalam. Even the examples cited by the assistants might have an undertone of negative nature, which also have not been corrected because they are also part of the Malayalam language .I have seen only the acceptability and grammaticality of the usages. However lot of editorial work had to be done primarily because the data inputting were done first with ILEAP Fonts and later it was converted to Unicode fonts.
Schemata for the Dictionary: One of the goals in learning a Language is to acquire sufficient number of words and to transact in the language in the most efficient way without bringing in any anomaly, whether it is in the first language learning situation or in the second language learning. Our issues would be centered on the second language learning and the acquisition of vocabulary and how this dictionary could be effectively used as a supporting material. After having acquired the fundamental structures of any language by a second language learner, one problem encountered by them is that they are not in a position to use suitable words at the appropriate context.
The basic difference between first language learning situation and the second language learning situation is that in L1, the learner would be aware af the concepts and the further extensions of it may be stylistic variations. Of course it would also be dependent on the age, experience, worldly knowledge and several other factors, Whereas in the case second language learner every word that he/she would be hearing would be a set a undifferentiated sounds and to relate the lexemes to different concepts, which would involve the experience of the learner in the target language so there is a need for gradation of the vocabulary. The question would arise what kind of vocabulary should be given primary importance and the schemata for it.
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