Telugu is a very ancient Indian language that has its roots in Sanskrit. The total number of the letters as well as the letters in the Alphabets of both the languages are the same. Almost 90 % of the nouns and adjectives in Telugu come from Sanskrit. Moreover, any of the Sanskrit words can be translated into Telugu easily by adopting the Telugu equivalents of the “case” suffixes (vibhakti pratyaya-s).
With all the above given, however, when I was rendering into English some of the Vedantic texts, I found to my dismay, that over time, the meanings of the some of the words in Telugu got transformed into a different sense than the exact phonetically sounding original Sanskrit word! It was a task for me as a Telugu speaker to get instilled into my brain that a particular Sanskrit word, though the same as in Telugu, connotes a different meaning than what I am accustomed to. Continue reading