Language of Science – a response

Leo Fernando (“Language of Science”, 24 March) mentions that Jawarhalal Nehru “thought it fit to retain English, as the medium of instructions for higher education.” India has a highly stratified society, in which a minority knows English and studies in that language. Of course, the sheer size of India means that such a small minority dwarfs the entire population of tiny countries, such as ours.

In Sri Lanka, we simply do not have the resources, not enough competent English teachers, to teach English to all students, at least not to the level required for comprehending scientific concepts.However, Fernando is quite correct when he says that we have an artificial system of Sinhala and Tamil scientific terminology. For some reason, our pundits decided to use terms derived from either Sanskrit or Hela  (depending on intellectual leaning). As anybody approaching the Official Languages website’s glossaries will know, each different government institution follows a different glossary.When I was in the Sri Lanka Railways many years ago, we introduced a new incentive scheme, which I asked one of my subordinates to translate into Sinhala. The latter used Aelian de Silva’s Hela-based Electrical Department Official Glossary, which resulted in the text being almost totally incomprehensible to the workers. For instance, it translates “mechanical engineer” as “yathikuru idikaru”.

However, this is not to say that technical workers use only English terms. For example, technicians don’t say “spanner” or “screw driver”, but “yathura” and “iskuruppu niyana”.

Many more terms derive from the Dutch, Portuguese, Malayalee and (in the case of Sinhala) Tamil. I love the name “yakada maran” for the tree Syzygium zeylanicum (the wood was used in smelting iron) a hybrid of Sinhala (“yakada”, iron) and Tamil (“maran”, tree) – incidentally, giving a clue as to the genesis of traditional smelting technology.

Even some of the English-derived terms have lost any connection to their origin. For example, “red lead” has become “raeklet”, and the Lord knows whence came “alis katuwa” (awl), or “aariya” and “abish” (“down” and “up”, in connection with cranes and lifts). There are many terms which derive from traditional practices, which the Official Glossaries mix up. For example “paahanawa” is actually not the official translation “to anneal”, but the same as “paassanawa”, “to weld”.It behoves the powers that be to revisit the official glossaries and to revise their contradictory contents holistically, with reference to day-to-day usage, and derive usable terms in a rational synthesis.

Vinod Moonesinghe