Shobhana Chelliah: Studying ancient words

Delving into ancient languages is like solving a jigsaw puzzle, says Shobhana Chelliah, linguist and assistant professor in the English department. Chelliah works on reconstruction of the ancient language of Meithei, a language spoken in northeast India and related to Tibetan and Burmese.

Chelliah was born in Tamil Nadu, India. As a student at the University of Delhi, she first started down the path of language study by focusing on literature. She was a bookworm and enjoyed reading poetry and novels. Midway through her education, the language aspect of literature became more appealing than the socio-cultural.

"Friends of mine spoke Meithei and piqued my interest," Chelliah says. "It is spoken in Manipuri, which is on the other side of Bangladesh, so the culture is exotic and different."

Manipuri became part of India in the 1940s and has a population of about 2.3 million people with 1.2 million of these speaking Meithei. Meithei has barely been studied by Western scholars, and part of what drives Chelliah as a linguist is the desire to bring the world a better understanding of the language and culture.

"Establishing the history of a language can help shape cultural and national identity; that makes my work so rewarding," Chelliah says. "When a linguist shows how special, how carefully constructed a language is, this helps speakers take pride in their own culture and heritage."

Chelliah is working on a dictionary of Meithei and is also comparing the present meanings of words to their meanings 200 years ago. Meithei has a simple sound system but a more complicated structure. For instance, words that convey directions such as "up" and "down" can also be used in reference to time — "before" and "after."

"It's a neat way of packaging your environment, but it's a challenge to put a dictionary together if there are 10 different meanings for one word," Chelliah says.

After her Meithei research is completed, she plans to work on the acquisition of English in India.

"I feel like I should be contributing back to India, and I think this would be a useful way of doing it. A lot of really smart people in India can't rise from poverty because they don't know or aren't properly taught academic English, so they don't have access to jobs where English is needed. I want to help my colleagues set up English as a foreign language programs and teach new methods of teaching English."

Currently, Chelliah teaches courses in English as a second language and language and gender.

"I enjoy my work — the words, the sentences and how they fit together. I look at it like a puzzle" she says. "Once you get the pieces together they form a neat system that allows you to see the beauty of the language."

BY LISA WOODS kreese@unt.edu

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