A Scripted Journey

This post comprises of the entire article that I submitted for the TEDxICT Mumbai Blog. I'm not very confident of its selection.
The title I presented it with was 'Learning Writing', though I am now quite certain that the title of this post was apter. So, here I present, the raw, unedited form of it.

""I have always been looking out for opportunities to write. There must be people who have similar feelings out there. There are some people who write for the sake of writing. I don’t want to do that. I want to write something, something deep and interesting – like the literature I have read. The only writing that a student nowadays gets to do easily is, well, taking class notes and during exams. In the olden times, hostelites and their families would communicate using letters. Phone calls, SMSs and WhatsApp are much more prevalent now.

One thing I am really interested in is the art of writing. I don’t mean the way in which words are arranged or how the information is conveyed. I mean the art of actually “writing”. The shapes of alphabets and different writing styles intrigue me. Why is one symbol pronounced this way and the other that? This interest has driven my passion for scripts. Fortunately, this also gives me a good reason and an excellent opportunity to write.

If a language is an app, then the OS is its script. So, knowing the script doesn’t tell me about the language. If I know a script, I can ‘read’ what’s written but understanding what I’m reading is an entirely different endeavour. Scripts are absolute, languages are variable. The first script I learnt would have to be Devanagari. Devanagari covers three languages, at least. I’m happy to say that I know these three – Marathi, Hindi and Sanskrit. The second script I learnt was the Roman script. This is the script used by the English language. The script is a base for many European languages – German, French, Spanish – you name it! To survive, knowing these two scripts and some associated languages is more than enough.

Some 7 years back, I went to Kolkata on a vacation. I couldn’t read the signs, banners and posters written in Bangla. I asked my dad to teach me. He did. Now, I could understand elementary things like names of hotels and so. I was happy. When we came back home, the matter was forgotten.

When we start learning algebra, we are gradually introduced to the Greek α, β. Get the pun? The Greek alphabet is, at the start, uncannily similar to the Roman alphabet. This led me to think about the historical links between the two. I was happy to know I was on the right track when I read quotes of famous people saying that European culture exists thanks to the Greek culture.

While studying for the scholarship exams and NTSE, I realised that my favourite sort of mental aptitude testing question type was the coding-decoding type. Learning new scripts is quite like these questions.

In 2014, we had the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. I didn’t know what’s written on the banners. My curiosity made me learn the Russian script – the Cyrillic. It shares many alphabets with Greek.

Two years back, I went to Karnataka. By just studying and comparing the road signs in Kannada to their English counterparts, I deciphered the Kannada script in just 5 days! Mind you, I do not know the Kannada language, but I can ‘read’ it. I may not understand it, but I can transliterate it.

This event fuelled me to learn more and more scripts. The same year, I started learning the Urdu script – the Nasta ‘līq script. Understanding this was a challenge. The letters look very different when seen separately and when used in words. They meld into one another, giving the script a sense of beauty. I can now read, and understand, Urdu, aided by the knowledge of Hindi.

Once, I went to the hospital. I saw some dots embossed onto the elevator button. I then learnt Braille visually – after all, it is a script. I heard the television advertisement for Idea, and a friend’s father pointed out that the “di di di deet deet di di di” at the end of it was actually “SMS” in Morse. I learnt Morse. One may realise that directly reading and writing it is a pain. So, I connected the dots, literally, in the case of Braille, creating a new modified script. Similarly, I modified Morse to make it look like oriental writing systems, but it is still alphabetical and not pictorial. All these are still scripts.

On my vacation to the north-east, I practised my Bangla and learnt the Assamese script, compared them. They are very similar, but differences are evident. For instance, the sound ‘w’ doesn’t exist in Bangla but does in Assamese. It’s the opposite for the ‘s’ sound.

I’m sort of acquainted with the Tamil script too. This helped me knowing that Bangla and Assamese use styles similar to Tamil for the ‘e’ and ‘o’ vowels to be added to consonants, while Kannada is more Devanagari-like.

All the scripts I had learnt so far were alphabetical or pronunciation-based. I wanted to take it a step further and learn the dreaded pictorial writing styles of the orient. That explains my current efforts to learn Japanese. This time, I’m trying something new – learning the language and the script. Japanese is quite complex as a writing style, as it is not a writing ‘style’ but is a mixture of writing ‘styles’. There are three different scripts that make up Japanese literature. Two of these are pronunciation-based, but one is pictorial. So, wish me luck!

Arigatou-gozaimasu!""