Stephen David/India Today
New Delhi, Jul 2: Call it a quirk of fate or a coincidence of life. But this Jesuit priest has taught Kannada for more than 20 years at St Aloysius College in the coastal town of Mangalore, the very same place where German indologist Reverend Ferdinand Kittel produced the first Kannada-English dictionary of 70,000 words in 1894.
Kittel, who is almost forgotten in his native land Germany, also wrote a book on Kannada grammar, and has a statue dedicated to him on Bangalore’s MG Road.
There’s no such honour for Father Prashant Madtha, but he’s gone a step further with Kannada’s first thesaurus, Padanidhi, along the same lines.
Madtha says he loved the language since he was young and worked on the thesaurus, a 700-pager with one lakh words, for almost 20 years, spending hours reading old Kannada texts to look for words.
“There are 1,500 words and synonyms for the word death,” he says, citing an example, “each word is significant and it is fascinating as you delve deeper into their context.”
More than 16,000 words have synonyms in this thesaurus, along with relevant idioms and sayings. He has also collected hundreds of words, old and new, from more than 60 dictionaries.
Now the principal of St Joseph’s Evening College in Bangalore, Madtha is hoping for a renewed interest in learning traditional languages like Kannada.
Madtha, who coined the word padanidhi, as there is no word for thesaurus in Kannada, says that there was an attempt to work on a 150-page thesaurus in alphabetical order by Hanasogi, a scholar, but this new Kannada thesaurus is the first of its kind in terms of the sheer volume of words and the expansiveness of the subject.
Madtha’s volume has six main conceptual categories and 886 sub-categories, encompassing Kannada in all its colloquial styles and evolutionary stages right from the time of Pampa, a Kannada poet of the 10th century.
“The method followed in Padanidhi is that of Roget’s Thesaurus in English. Instead of an alphabetical order, it is conceptually arranged,” he says
A popular Konkani writer with an anthology of two volumes in that language, he has also edited a volume of 10,000 Konkani idioms.
“I don’t want a statute but I’d like my work to open a world of excitement and wonder to readers in a language that we take for granted,” says Madtha, from behind a tower of books at the two-storey stone building on Residency Road, Bangalore.