Handout of the paper to be presented in the South Asian Lamguage Analysits Rountable 26th 2006 December 19-21 Kannada University, Hampi & CIIL Mysore Dravidian University Page 1 14/12/06 Language, body and reality: Five Hypotheses on Dravidian Languages P.Sreekumar, Dravidian University, Andhra Pradesh “But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue 1 ” (Shakespeare: Hamlet, 155.ii.8.) 1. Introduction Between reality and language body exists as a being. It is there, between the phenomena 2 and noumena 3 . It exists, not only as a corporal presence which bares the species specificity to talk. But it is the medium by which we are translating noumena as phenomenon into our consciousness. It is the medium of all perception; it is the organ of perception and is necessarily involved in all perception. Language is the verbal extension of body. Body extends into the constructed world by language. It is the organ by which the enworlded 4 word is exteriorizing as speech. Language is in the body as an epiphenomenon 5 . Body is in the language as a metaphor with a lexical presence on the semantic structure of the language. These three form into a tracheotomy. This paper is an exploration of this tracheotomy of language, body and reality. First part of this paper explores how modern linguistics has treated body as an instrument, bearer and seat of language. The second puts forward five hypotheses on the presence of body in the semantic structure of the major Dravidian languages. 2. Body in Linguistics 2.1. To Leonard Bloomfield, language is a semantic link, which fills the discontinuity of bodies. He has narrated semantic link between somatic gap of two bodies in the story of Jack and Jill. Bloomfield noted “the gap between the bodies of the speaker and hearer –the discontinuity of the two nervous system is bridged by the sound waves” 6 . To Bloomfield, language, the actual process of languaging is taking place in the absence of the extension of body as it is to other body. Presence of the other body and the absence of the extension of one’s body make 1 This refers to an ancient belief that not being able to talk about and express grief is what breaks the heart. It was in Macbeth as poignant expression by Hamlet. 2 Phenomena are something that is shown, or revealed, or manifest in experience. In Kantian metaphysics the phenomena are objects and events as they appear in our experience, as opposed to object and events as they are in themselves (noumena). See Immanuel Kant.1770 and 1787. 3 Noumena is denoting things as they are in themselves, as opposed to things as they are for us, knowable by the sense (phenomena). See Kant :1770, 1787 4 ..an act of enworlding in which things come into being through naming .See Stephen A. Tayler 1995: p.275 5 Epiphenomenon is an incidental product of some process that has no effect of its own. 6 Bloomfield 1933/1935/1963 : p.26