If ever you thought English was a single language, forget it!!!

English is a word used to describe many languages. It is not the language spoken by the ‘English’men. Not just. It is also the language spoken by the Americans (all varieties of them). It is definitely the language spoken by the Indians (Red, North, South, whatever).

This, by the way is true of almost all other languages as well. There is Telugu for instance, and there are Telugu, Telugu and Telugu.

Come to think of it, languages, all languages…evolve. They change with time. They change with geography. And they change quite fashionably.

Think of the English you learnt in school. And compare it to the English your children are learning. Their rules are quite different from ours, right?

And that is true of near sexagenarians like me. And it is true of my young adult children who think their nieces speak atrocious English. The nieces of course think we speak an archaic language.

It’s very easy to belittle or deride someone who doesn’t speak ‘your’ kind of language whether it is English or Hindi or Telugu. But it is wrong.

The version of English for instance that you speak, may be something you learnt in a different place, a different society, a different time and for a different need. As a result I should not find fault with you for not understanding the subtleties of PG Wodehouse. And you should not find it strange that my SMSes do not normally use abbreviations.

In this context two brands have taught lessons the world should never forget. One is Nikon. And the other is MS Word.

Did you know for instance  that while Nikon bodies have undergone amazing changes over the years, any or all the lenses of older manufacture have always been made compatible to the new cameras.

Similarly MS Word. Each new version of Word is capable of reading the older formats and in fact offers to save in the latest format and offers it to you as a matter of choice. There’s never any compulsion to ‘upgrade’ or ‘migrate’.

I wish English (and all the other languages) was taught with a basic principle. A basic requirement of backward compatibility. Speak how you want, but understand me without difficulty. If you know what I mean.

So your English may be Ver_09 and mine may be Ver_03 but we understand each other perfectly well. And unlike softwares that can only write in their current avataar, our language writing skills should be cross-platform, cross-generational and cross-country.

So if you do not ken, don’t ask me to sod off