English-Malayalam Bilingual Dictionary (With CD)

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 of Malayalam starts learning the 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.

The present dictionary would be equally useful to the native speaker of Malayalam as well as to others. 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, Manipur, 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 to Institute 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 study 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 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. During the initial work on this project for a year or so, I was ably assisted by Dr. K. J. Joseph and am particularly thankful to him. The present one had gone undergone several modifications as my intention was to bring into an electronic format in which case we would be in a position to have a bilingual bidirectional dictionary, by the click of a mouse we can get both Malayalam and English words meanings simultaneously and similar strategy is adopted in the case of other series of Malayalam-Tamil, Malayalam-Kannada and Malayalam-Telugu.

­ "VaagbhuushaNaM bhuushaNaM"

Bhartrihari

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 8th 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 Sarat chandran 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 ENGLISH-MALAYALAM 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.

CUL 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.

**Contents and Sample Pages**