Inclusion of Web 2.0 – From a Tamilian’s Perspective

I am pleased to write about web 2.0. It has become the millionth English word. British News papers have described this as 'disappointingly geeky' term. Anyhow, the word has entered into the English lexicon. Global Language Monitor finds new words and adds them to the lexicon. The word “Web 2.0” competed with “Financial Tsunami” and Emerged as the millionth word based on the number of appearances in the print media. English has absorbed as many as foreign words as possible and the recent one being, “Jai ho”.

With English language gaining new word every 98 minutes and the abnormal growth of lexicon has made life tough for the researchers in the natural language processing domain. Apart from “Web 2.0”, there are many other jargons too are added to the lexicon such as 'cloud computing', 'carbon neutral', and 'sexting' - the sending of suggestive messages and pictures by SMS. These growing lexicons have overtaken the words contributed by “William Shakespeare”.

Every Language has acquired as many as words as possible from other languages and Tamil too is not an exception for this phenomenon. Few years ago, the versatile actor Kamal Haasan quipped that words “Bus” and “Kiss” have become a part of Tamil Lexicon and people can’t avoid using words such as these. Tholkappiyam (A great Tamil literature - If you think about that serial actor, I am not responsible for that and you have a disease that’s almost incurable) says that “எல்லா சொல்லும் பொருள் குறித்தனவே” which means all Tamil words are based on its meaning and there’s nothing wrong in embracing words from other languages.