In a piece on the Diwali celebrations being staged by members of the expatriate Indian community living in Silicon Valley, reporter Alison van Diggelen of National Public Radio's PRI interviewed Indian nationals about words. Has the Indian influence brought enlightenment to Silicon Valley? Here's what she found, excerpted from her piece Silicon Valley gets linguistic enlightenment from India.
Jasho Patnaik, a software engineer from Odisha state, in Eastern India…said Diwali is much more than a festival of lights…
For Patnaik, Diwali and other Indian traditions like meditation inform his view of technology. Take the word avatar, a Hindu concept popularized by the blockbuster movie. It pops up all over the place: in computer sciences, artificial intelligence and even robotics.
“Avatar is actually a Sanskrit Hindi word, it’s a spirit taking a new form for something,” said Padmasree Warrior, chief technology and strategy officer at Cisco Systems in San Jose. “Every time I see that word, it instills a sense of pride.”
This spiritual influence from India has become embedded in Silicon Valley culture. Of course words like guru and mantra have been around in America for decades but in tech boardrooms and coffee shops, expressions like coding guru and fail-fast mantra are now part of the Silicon Valley vernacular.
Junglee is a Hindi word meaning wild or ill-mannered. It was used by a Silicon Valley startup (founded, of course, by a team of Indians) that was acquired by Amazon.
The interplay of Hindi and English predates Silicon Valley, of course.
During India’s colonial days, the English language absorbed many words from Hindi: words such as jungle, juggernaut, and pundit. These words have migrated from India to Britain to America, but some well-educated Indians in Silicon Valley still talk in a stilted English of centuries past. Raj Oberoi shares some examples: Phrases like ‘do the needful’ or ‘I beg to stay.’
This old-fashioned talk sometimes leaves American colleagues in the IT world scratching their heads and seeking explanations.
Oberoi explains that it’s a rediscovery for Americans of a language that, even in Britain, is basically dying out. It’s more archaic, very formal, very flowery and it harkens back to the days of the Raj.
Then there is Hinglish:
Cisco’s Padmasree Warrior shares an example of Hinglish, a Hindi-English mingling that adds Hindi suffixes to English words.
“Hey did you go to the Gym–shim yesterday?” Warrior said. “That means did you go work out?” Some, like me, consider Hinglish delightful. Others worry that people who use it too much will never properly master Hindi--or English.
Diggelen is not the only linguistic detecitve on the Indians-in-American case. Our own Ben Zimmer recently documented the evolution of the Indian term desi when brought to American soil in a recent Wall Street Journal column, "Here She Comes, 'Desi' Miss America."