P. Sankaranarayana's glowing admiration for English in the Introduction of Telugu-English Dictionary (1900) -
"...the English language is, in general, exceedingly shorter than Telugu and other Indian languages. On still closer examination the interesting truth comes to light that its vocabulary as a whole is admirably short and economic. In fact, it seems to be at very near the minimum cost of utterance that English achieves the object of all language-expressing thoughts and feelings
...we find an extraordinary and astonishing brevity and simplicity in the English language. A very large percentage of its words, more especially its commonest and most useful words, are monosyllabic and dissyllabic
...the English vocabulary seems to be to that of our languages what shorthand is to longhand in writing
An eloquent speaker in English can pour forth in the ears and hearts of his spell-bound audience a volume of no less than perhaps three, four or five thousand words in an hour with their underlying ideas, notions, and thoughts, while his brother speaker in the adjacent hall cannot be blamed for not plodding through more than say a third of the number in his Vernacular in the same space of time. Or, if the work done be the same, if a speaker takes one hour to deliver a speech in English, other things equal, he must take to do the same in one of our vernaculars, say some three hours. The whole business of one session of the British Parliament or any of our law courts, so far as it relates to and depends upon speaking and language, would have been delightfully done in some three sessions.
The proportion between the labors, times, hands, wires, cables required to wire the same quantity of messages in the two languages would show that our long-winded languages would stamp out and destroy perhaps more than half of the business and work of the world that rests upon telegraphic communication...
...the value of short words must assert itself and become emphasized when they are put to use in innumerable ways for military and naval purposes by a nation and a tongue that are ruling well-nigh half the world.
I should be grossly mistaken if it does not deserve to rank as a most valuable and important truth brought to light, that in English we talk more and express and exchange a greater quantity of thoughts in a given time than in our Vernaculars, a truth competent, who can deny, to determine the fates or destinies of languages, and of great moment to us in this country, and to the position and prospects of the English language in this land, and, with it, to the material good and prosperity of its people."
