Perhaps a delicate subject to bring up, but talking in the Forest to friends and acquaintances who are of Indian or other south Asian heritage brings back long lost memories of studies and interests in languages from that multi lingual part of the world. In medical centres, shops and other places in the Forest, I’ve been remembering my sadly short experience of learning Indian languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) well over half a century ago.

A long illness cut off my studies and, having to work for my living, I moved on to the modern world of information technology (or computing as we used to call it), and lost my short exposure to these languages.

English and Hindi are in the Indo European classification of languages, along with most European languages and some Indian languages. A theory has it that there was a nomadic group of people who roamed central Asia many millennia ago and spoke proto-Indo European, before they split off south to India and west to Europe where original languages developed in different ways, to become in Germanic (which includes English), Romance, Slavonic and some Indian languages. In Europe, these languages, introduced by foreign settlers and other invaders, wiped out all the original European languages, with the exception of Basque, Hungarian and Finnish. But there’s still some remote relationship between Hindi and English. Hindi is written in the Devanagari script, left to right, but with strange characters hanging down from a line above. ‘Deva’ is related to the English ‘Divine’ and nagara means city, so the written language is portrayed as a sacred city/business tool.

The ancient language Sanskrit is a remote forerunner of modern Indo European languages, and has a similar relationship to modern Indian languages as Latin has to European languages. My Sanskrit learning was brief, but if you have some time to spare I can recite some ancient verse about the mighty king Nala, whose great characteristics and achievements are recorded in the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata. When I was a horse racing tipster in a local newspaper many years ago I had the nom de plume of Ashvakovidah, with ashva meaning horse, ko meaning very, and vidah meaning ‘wise’. Sadly, my tips did not match up to my ambitious nom de plume.

South India has its own languages, mainly in the Dravidian language group, and I’ve noticed some Tamil (spoken in South India and Sri Lanka), and Malayalam in Lydney and in the Forest Hospital. When I visited the Forest Hospital I learned the Malayalam ‘namas karam’ (hello), and Shubh a rathri (good night’), to address some members of the staff, and I believe the language flourishes in Lydney.

Shubh a dinam (good day).