There’s some happy news on the personal front—I got placed recently, so I am likely to have more money in the future to spend on this blog! And ever since the 1st of December, I have been, as Oscar Wilde said, living entirely for pleasure.  From having Starters only! lunches to spending the whole night playing weirdass games with friends, it’s been a great time so far.

In this post-placement decadence, I went to watch The Dirty Picture. It had fairly decent reviews (some even said it was blousefull), and the tickets were fairly inexpensive—what more can a man want? Since this is a linguistics blog, I won’t talk much about the movie. For instance, I won’t say that I found the movie fairly _meh_ nor would I say that it was rather boring after the interval. I would also refrain from writing that you might want to consider watching _Puss in boots_ instead. Instead, I would talk about a thing of linguistic interest in this movie. It was this dialogue:

Touch toh bahuton ne kiya hai mujhe par chhua kisi ne nahin. (Many [men] have touched [verb in English] me, but no one has yet touched [same verb in Hindi] me)

Those of you who don’t know Hindi might have said ‘Dude! WTF!?!’ on reading the translation. Well, this is also what Vivek and I said, though we are both native speakers of Hindi, so rest assured that nothing has been lost in translation.

I am aware that all languages have unique words which are often untranslatable into single-word expressions in other languages without losing their essence. A lot of people find this very exciting, and most articles talking about languages usually treat this as central to the discussion. And this fact also tends to be abused by people across the world who start drawing threads of causality between a language’s unique vocabulary and cultural facts surrounding people who speak that language. For instance, English probably does not have a word which means the same as the German S_chadenfreude,_ though we can of course describe it as the joy you get out of other people’s miseries, and so on. However, claiming that Germans are more likely to be vindictive and vengeful than the Britons because of this one word is patently foolish, but this is the sort of argument that you find all over the place.

This made me question whether the dialogue writer was trying to allude to such a difference in meaning when they wrote that dialogue—and I haven’t been able to find any. The dialogue implied that touching is the pedestrian version of human contact, the sort of contact that comes as an occupational hazard of being a pseudo-prostitute. On the other hand, chhoona (to touch in Hindi) is the warm, loving and sensual version of the same contact that one would associate with the delicate touch of a true lover.

As someone who’s perfectly fluent in both English and Hindi, I felt that this distinction had been pulled out of thin air. Interestingly, a song from this very movie—

Ooh la la Ooh la la, tu hai meri fantasy… chhoona na chhoona na, ab main jawaan ho gayi.

uses chhoona in the first sense.

Now, as I have often said on this blog, my aim at pointing these things out is not to quibble about language usage à la grammar Nazis. My aim is to look at the reasons why people choose to use language the way they do, and to look at what all goes on in our minds when we try to interpret what we hear or read.

One possible reason is that people associate some languages with _class_ or style. This is often because using a particular language is a mark of high register and erudition. Take, for instance, the use of Urdu words in Hindi songs. Often, they do help introduces subtle differences in meaning, but a lot of instances of Urdu in songs can be replaced with more everyday words without significant loss in meaning (but with significant loss in poetic value, of course). I have no problem with this. As I mentioned in a previous post, Whose Hindi is it?, I am all for such assimilation. But none of it explains the dialogue. So it shall continue to be a mystery to me.

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  3.  I am working on the second part of the multi-part series, How to learn languages. Will post it soon.