Expanding the possibilities of the English language

The English language has entered the 21st century at its usual meditative pace, unwilling to sacrifice its dignity and majesty to the impulses of progress, and yet, perhaps with a languid and regretful sigh, forced to acknowledge that advances in technology have rendered vast tracts of vocabulary obsolete almost overnight. We now live in the age of email and text messages, where nouns are used as verbs; where punctuation is a tangled mess of slashes, dots, arrows, and angle brackets; where entire sentences have been sent into exile and mysterious abbreviations reveal hidden doors to knowledge with a simple touch.

And yet, one has to admire the ability of the English language to adapt to the pressing demands of technology and science. These are ever-changing realities that cannot be ignored and any language must have the ability to communicate as its primary goal if it is to remain relevant.

What then about the unchanging realities, the inner experiences and realizations that remain essentially the same for humanity generation after generation? Here we cannot affirm that new circumstances have arisen that would validate the expansion of the language; the wise have always been like this. “Lofty thoughts must have lofty language,” said Aristophanes in the fourth century BC.

And yet it is undeniably true that writers throughout the centuries have been confronted with what can only be called the limitations of the English language in the realm of emotional and spiritual experience. “Words form the thread on which we thread our experiences,” wrote Aldous Huxley, but unfortunately, one is forced to admit that along with some of the world’s other languages, particularly those of the East, the English language is singularly impoverished in this field.

What words we have we owe largely to Shakespeare, who is said to have coined more than 1,000 new words to meet the needs of his dramatic dialogue. Barbara Wallraff, in her book Word Fugitives, attributes verbs such as “smear”, “prevent” and “rant” to the bard. In the second half of the 19th century, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins coined such compounds as “wind-walks”, “silk-sack”, “dapple-dawn-drawn”, and “fathers-forth”.

“My poetry doubtless errs on the side of strangeness,” Hopkins confessed to Robert Bridges in a letter dated February 15, 1879. The fact that Hopkins’s innovations have not passed into general language does not lessen the exquisite beauty of his poems, the urgency of a soul that tries to find the most perfect means to express the divine.

The renowned Indian poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore stated: “When old words die on the tongue, new melodies spring from the heart.”

The truth of his statement is reflected in a small group of English-language writers who have spontaneously improvised their own words for certain insights, experiences, and inner realities. One of the most prolific is the contemporary Indian poet Sri Chinmoy, who has made compound nouns his lingua franca.

Although born in Bengal, Sri Chinmoy has been writing in English for more than half a century. He is no longer considered a newcomer to the language, but in many ways his ease with innovation reflects the joy of discovering the language anew. He imagines being the first person to say something, invites Barbara Wallraff. And Virginia Woolf vividly portrays “the coining genius of words, as if thought plunged into a sea of ​​words and came out
drip.”

Here are some samples of Sri Chinmoy’s unique style. They come from a small selection of her poems entitled The caged bird and the cageless bird:

My heart is loaded with many things,

But one thing haunts me

In every silence

And that’s the mountain-load

From the sadness of the world.

————–

surf

Beyond the dawn sky.

reach

the pinnacle goal

Before sunset cry.

————-

The day is fast approaching

When the hope seekers caravan

It will be successful and glorious

Go through the frustration-desert.

————-

my soul-fire,

Where can I find you, where?

My ignorance-swamp,

When can I transform you, when?

—————

The mind

It’s a strange-peace-world

Y

A strangler to world peace.

Clearly, the poet has developed these variants of compound names to concentrate their expression in as few words as possible. It is therefore a technique of brevity and power. He has eliminated all connecting words that, in a poetic context, can be perceived as weakening the impact of a sentence. “The load of the mountain/of the world’s pain” carries a much greater force, for example, than “The load of the mountain of the world’s pain”.

Although it is not common to use compound nouns in such abundance, Sri Chinmoy’s approach is definitely acceptable within the limits of the English language. Also, the compound nouns of it have the advantage of being familiar. The words themselves are not new; it is their mixture that impresses itself on the reader’s imagination with singular novelty and freshness. We know, for example, what “silence” and “gap” mean separately; it’s the new acronym “hush-gap” that evokes a different kind of energy in the poem. It fuses an auditory and spatial image to create something intensely alive. Here then surely is what Virginia Woolf called thought that “dipped in a sea of ​​words and came out dripping”.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, speaking from his own vast experience as a writer and philosopher, stated: “There is no choice of words for one who clearly sees the truth.” It is this imperative sentiment that pervades Sri Chinmoy’s writings and compels him to describe the mind, for example, as “a stranger to world peace” and “a strangler to world peace.” Both are extremely strong images, made even more so by the precise parallelism of the triple compounds. There is nothing cryptic or dark about these references. In fact, the word order of each compound and their proximity in the
The poem allows us to follow the poet in his creative process, trace his training. In fact, the compounds enhance and illuminate his thought process to an unusual degree.

Sri Chinmoy is very fond of these comparative compounds to provide the key to understanding his poems. Thus, the “caravan of hope” passes through the “desert of frustration.” The intangible quality of hope is allied with a tangible image (“caravan”) moving, albeit slowly, across the arid wastelands. In the same way, the intangible quality of “frustration” is linked to the desert, a powerful image of endless and hopeless dryness and emptiness. Together, the two compounds make up a remarkably vibrant portrait of spiritual despair infused with a glimmer of hope.

A permanent feature of Sri Chinmoy’s compound nouns is that they are not clever in a purely intellectual sense. He doesn’t turn his two words into a pastiche (like “ignoramire” for “ignorancemire”). Rather, he chooses to build pictures and images from ancient words while allowing these words to retain their integrity. His technique is more like that of the Chinese calligrapher who combines the characters for (1) tree, (2) large, and (3) sighing admiringly into a pictograph denoting a chair. Working with a similar type of craft, Sri Chinmoy breathes new life into some of the oldest words in our language: soul, sky, fire, cry, tree, flower.

Writing in the late 19th century, Alexander Smith said, “Memorable sentences are memorable because of a single word that radiates from them.” Sri Chinmoy’s poems are often memorable because of some unique compound noun that radiates from it, and I would not be surprised if many of these compounds entered the English language naturally and endowed it with a whole new spiritual dimension.

Dr Vidagdha Bennett

References

• Chinmoy, Sri. The caged bird and the cageless bird. New York: Aum Publications, 1998.
• Jacobs, Alan, ed. mystic verse. Massachusetts: Element Books, 1997.
• Wallroff, Barbara. Fugitives of the word. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.