“What is another word for 'synonym'?” somebody asked me the other day. “What is the abbreviation of 'abbreviation'?” I retorted. We laughed it off. But abbreviations are no laughing matter. Abbreviations have become an essential part of our life. They are a world unto themselves. In some disciplines, especially technological ones, they have become a language within a language, and unless you know what they stand for, you are in the soup.

I cannot tell RAM from ROM. For instance, I thought RAM stood for the Royal Academy of Music, but a child disclosed it to me that it had got something to do with computers. Well, may be. But as for me, it is fine as long as I can type these lines with two fingers and e-mail the stuff off to Dawn. These ROM etc may take care of themselves.

But things do not sail that smoothly for those who are really in the sciences, and for poor 'Urdu-walas' (I am one of them), they get really worse when it comes to abbreviations. Though there has been a steady flow of glossaries and dictionaries of scientific and technical terms in Urdu and some of such dictionaries enlist a few abbreviations, too, there was hitherto no dictionary in Urdu that gave abbreviations and their full forms with explanations. Muhammad Islam Nishter has filled that gap with his 'Kashshaaf-i-mukhaffafaat siensi-o-tekniki uloom'. As abbreviations are in an exponential umber, only scientific and technical abbreviations have been included in the book, though they, too, are unusually large in number and only a few thousand of them could be compiled. The compiler intends to extend his work to other fields and says it is only the beginning.

Published by Lahore's Urdu Science Board, the book gives some 5,000 scientific abbreviations in English and their explanations in Urdu. In his foreword, Nishter says that coinage of scientific Urdu terms saw its golden period at Hyderabad Deccan's Usmania University where over 80,000 scientific terms were translated into Urdu. But no work could be done there on Urdu abbreviations of scientific terms, though the principles for the use of mathematical symbols and Greek alphabets in Urdu had been chalked out. Similarly, he says, after independence, Major Aftab Hasan under his Scientific Society [and Karachi University's Bureau of Composition, Compilation and Translation] worked for scientific terms' translations, but no progress was made as far as abbreviations are concerned.

Now, when science and technology have entered the 21st century with all their advancement, writes Nishter, the linguistic parameters, too, have changed drastically. He feels that the onslaught of the English language in today's world has posed a greater challenge to our national language and laments that we are bent upon destroying our linguistic heritage by intermingling English with Urdu. The compilation of some basic principles that serve as a criterion for translating scientific and technical terms into Urdu has become inevitable, he says.

While one can only agree with most of what he has said in his foreword and one must appreciate the back-breaking efforts that must have gone into preparing such a voluminous English-Urdu abbreviations dictionary, one cannot help but feel that the dictionary, despite all its merits, is lacking at least in one way with almost every entry the compiler informs the reader that the English term 'is called so and so in Urdu'. And believe me, there are hundreds of entries that have never been heard of in Urdu, let alone 'Urdu mein ise falan falan kehte hain' ('in Urdu it is called so and so'). I would like to ask the learned compiler to kindly give me even a single example of the hundreds of so-called 'Urdu equivalents' about which he invariably says 'Urdu mein ise ... ... ... kehte hain' (in Urdu it is called ... ... ...). He never bothers to tell the reader 'kaun kehta hai' (who says so), notwithstanding the practice in Urdu lexicography of citing illustrative sentences that has been in place for centuries. True, for scientific terms there can hardly be an illustrative sentence in Urdu explaining the correct meaning and usage, especially if the term comes from a newly developed branch of technology. But, then, one should not pronounce that it 'is called' such and such in Urdu but just suggest that it 'may be called' so and so.

Instead of letting the readers decide whether this labour of love is worth it, the compiler in his foreword has declared twice that this experiment of translating and compiling English scientific abbreviations into Urdu has been very 'successful'. One is surprised at this favourable self-assessment pronounced even before the book is published. But looking at the morbid trend of self-glorification at book launches, he may be pardoned for this, especially taking into account the good aspects of the book.

A good aspect of the dictionary is that it gives the English abbreviations of scientific and technical terms both in Roman and Urdu scripts. It is quite understandable as there is a tendency all over the world these days to adopt and assimilate the English scientific and technological terminologies, as they are, into the native languages so as to enable the researchers and students to understand the terms instantly when they come across such words during the course of their study, especially on the internet and, since most of the latest scientific research is available in English, in a book written in English. So, instead of coining unfamiliar Urdu equivalents, why not write them in Urdu script? But since the author is in favour of coining Urdu equivalents, too, he has given and in most cases coined such terms.

In his foreword, the compiler has counted different ways in which abbreviations are formed and has enlisted 'initials, selected letters, beginning letters, and mixed abbreviations' etc as examples. From the list, one can discern that some of the types enlisted by him may be arbitrary. One wonders, for instance, if there is any difference between 'initials' and 'beginning letters'. During his research for the book, he must have come across the word 'acronym'. According to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, an acronym is 'a word formed from the initial letters of other words (e.g. laser, Aids)'. He could well have used the term acronym to express at least one of the two kinds, or perhaps both of them. He thinks the PCSIR (Pakistan Council for Scientific and Industrial Research) is a good example of 'initials'. I feel Wapda (Water and Power Development (or is it Disturbance?) Authority) is a good example of acronyms since it forms a word while the PCSIR does not, and therefore it is not an acronym but an abbreviation.

Priced Rs1,200, the book is prohibitively expensive, especially for students.

drraufparekh@yahoo.com