The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Words, lots of them, from a Kannada lover

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Words, lots of them, from a Kannada lover

Staff Reporter

The thesaurus has been classified into six broad categories
Prashant Madtha has worked 10 years on the project

BANGALORE: Have you always wanted to improve your Kannada but were often stuck for the right words? Here’s something that could make you sound dexterous by helping you with synonyms and antonyms of any word, throwing in a few idioms and sayings that you could mouth, to show off your proficiency.

Say hello to Padanidhi, an exhaustive thesaurus that provides synonyms to 16,000 words, collected from 70 Kannada dictionaries and running into 800 pages. “I have chosen to follow the conceptual order rather than the alphabetical order so that you can find all words related to a concept at one place,” says the author Prashant Madtha S.J., Principal of St. Josephs Evening College.

The thesaurus has been classified into six broad categories — abstract relations, space, material world, intellect, volition, sentient and moral powers — which are further divided into 884 concepts. For those used to the alphabetical order, the book has a long list at the end where all words are listed in that order.

The introduction to the thesaurus is a narration of the history of Sanskrit, Kannada and English dictionaries and has a philosophical discussion on the synonymity.

“I have worked 10 years on this project. It obviously entailed a lot of work. I had to make cards for all of the concepts and arrange the related words accordingly,” says Fr. Madtha. He claims that this is the first Kannada thesaurus to use the conceptual order for arrangement of words.

But why the thesaurus and the long years of effort? Says he: “For its own sake and nothing else. I am a Kannada writer and I wanted to do this. I could undertake this exercise because as priests we have a lot of time on our hands.”

The 800-page tome, published by the St. Josephs College, was released by the former Chief Minister M. Veerappa Moily in the presence of poet G.S. Shivarudrappa on Friday.

“It is the 21st Century and the language is been introduced with new words and various meanings. Every language has its own value and people should take care of using it well, therefore this thesaurus can help people correct and develop their language,” Mr. Moily said.

“This thesaurus is useful and it contains information even about science and technology. Therefore it should also be fed into Internet or installed in computers,” said S.G. Siddaramaiah, Chairman, Kannada Book Authority.

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