More than just English words and Hindi meanings

Rajkumar Singh

With the world evolving into a global village, bilingual dictionaries have become more useful and needful. In the era of economic liberation, frequent travelling and trading have significantly diluted the boundaries between countries in terms of communication. In such a scenario, well-versed with an international language is need of the hour and undoubtedly English stands amid the list of international languages. 

Most of us Indians, especially from the north, recollect their memories and relationship with English-Hindi dictionary by Father Camille Bulcke. Father Bulcke was a Belgian Jesuit missionary who had a matchless mastery over Hindi language. He made an unforgettable contribution to India and to Hindi by way of his dictionary. Undoubtedly, that is a milestone in Indian dictionary landscape.

With the release of Parable International English-Hindi dictionary, Prof Abhai Maurya (founder Vice-Chancellor of Hyderabad-based Central University of English & Foreign Languages) has set a new milestone, doing a great service to both the languages and its users. Though it took dedicated hard work of almost eight years, Professor Maurya has finally succeeded in his endeavour to complete the largest and latest bilingual dictionary of 1,900 pages. Obviously, it wouldn’t have been an easy task. Maurya mentions that Hindi equivalents for meanings are much more difficult as most of the words have Sanskrit roots. These are artificially created meanings of English words based on Sanskrit grammar, which not everyone understands.  Maurya has been successful in providing descriptive meanings making things simpler for the users. This devoted effort deserves an applause.

In fact his work is more than a dictionary — it serves as an effective reference tool. Not only frequently used international abbreviations and acronyms are given in alphabetical order, Greek, Latin, Russian, Spanish and French words are also included along with their translation and proper Hindi pronunciation. Citing correct names of various countries and their capital cities in Hindi is a common problem even for the media, Maurya has mentioned these in English and Hindi along with their geographical milestones. He has improved upon Father Bulcke, Hardev Bahri and Badrinath Kapur’s earlier contributions to the dictionary world and the outcome is in a different league of its own.  

Traditionally, dictionaries are intended for use by scholars and professionals, interestingly Maurya has attempted to widen the target readership by incorporating computer, web and social media terminology in English and Hindi, along with their English pronunciation in Hindi. In short, this English-Hindi dictionary fulfils the long felt need for an updated and comprehensive cross-language dictionary. It may also be equally popular among the net-savvy generation. The only possible concern from the user standpoint could be the size and  weight of the dictionary — a multi volume set could perhaps solve this.