A scholar created a slip when he or she encountered a word fit for inclusion, and wrote down quotations that used the word, the source text and period, and the word’s meaning. The fundamental unit of dictionary composition in this case was the slip – an A5 piece of paper dedicated to a single word. One of them was GV, who would go on to become the chief editor of the dictionary. Seventy-three agreed to participate and were assigned books to trawl for words. The editors wrote letters to scholars across the state asking for help. They chose works of contemporary stalwarts such as KV Puttappa, Shivaram Karanth and others, making sure that different parts of the state were represented: “We wanted to collect words from Udupi, from Raichur, from Mysore, from Madikeri.” Then, there were words from nearly 10,000 Kannada inscriptions dating from the 4th century to the 18th century, and of course, words from all previously existing Kannada dictionaries. The editors identified 903 (later expanded to 1,750) works of literature from different periods – the 10th century Pampa and Ranna, the 15th century Kumaravyasa, the 17th century Lakshmisha.
Words would have to be gathered from written sources. “Unfortunately, no linguistic survey had been done in Kannada,” GV said. After a couple of years of administrative preparation, a dictionary office came up at the Kannada Sahitya Parishat in early 1944. The committee in charge was headed by Professor AR Krishnashastry, a scholar and polyglot who counted Pali, German and self-taught Bengali among his languages. It is still the best dictionary.” GV and his classmates at Yuvaraja College in Mysore. Also because, GV said, “It was the best dictionary. Their model was to be the Oxford English Dictionary, in part because the “historical principles” approach, where the evolution of word meanings is traced, was appropriate for a language as old as Kannada. The Parishat, a non-profit that serves to promote Kannada, resolved to create such a dictionary. Writers and researchers had long been feeling the need for an authoritative and comprehensive Kannada-Kannada dictionary when the matter came up for discussion in December 1941 at the annual meeting of the Kannada Sahitya Parishat. “It happened this way,” he began, at his austerely appointed home in south Bengaluru. His monumental achievement though remains the stewardship of the 54-year-long project which brought into being the Kannada Sahitya Parishat’s Nighan ṭ u – an eight-volume, 9,000-page monolingual dictionary. He’s had a distinguished working life as a college teacher and principal, as an editor, as a translator who has made works by Kabir, Shankaracharya, RL Stevenson and J Krishnamurthi available in Kannada, and as author of a large shelf’s worth of literary history and criticism. Now in his 104th year, GV – known by his initials as teachers often are – is a towering figure in the world of Kannada letters (and, as it happens, words). There wasn’t a precise equivalent, he said, and then went on to suggest a phrase the newspaper could use instead. It did what writers, translators and students dealing with Kannada-related linguistic crises have done now for decades: it asked Professor G Venkatasubbiah, a man whose name has become synonymous with Kannada usage and lexicography. Did the Pakistan foreign minister’s stance on Kashmir dash hopes of resuming ties with India?Ī couple of years ago, when there was talk of politician ND Tiwari and the result of a certain DNA test, a Kannada newspaper reporting the story found itself unable to come up with a term for “biological son”.Has Modi’s Vande Bharat push come at the cost of train safety?.Punjab seeks Centre’s intervention to help over 700 Indian students facing deportation from Canada.
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