Viswanathan K's Thoughts

How does one check whether language reflects reality? Or if it is a lens that affects what we perceive and register? At this point, Europeans realized none of their languages could help answer the question – they were too similar, and had intermixed too much. So they began to pay attention to the languages of far off places, including the so-called “primitives”, writes Guy Deutscher in Through the Language Glass . “The deficiencies that Gladstone and Geiger had uncovered were replicated exactly in living languages all over the world… (for example) red was always the first of the prismatic colours to receive a name.”   On the other hand, the eyesight data contradicted the idea of “defective colour vision” – no tribe was found that couldn’t make out the difference among colours. What had seemed impossible was now a reality – even if people could notice a difference, they didn’t always bother to assign it a word.   Magnus now tweaked his theory. Agreed, he said, everyo...

As I read the chapter on Greece in Tim Marshall’s Power of Geography , I was surprised by how little I knew of the country’s history, beyond the usual Athens-democracy-Plato-Aristotle-Alexander parts! “Mountains and water are the key to understanding the past, present and future of Greece.” Greece has lots of mountains all over its north. From ancient times to present day, they made trade in the northward direction very hard. It also meant that people couldn’t move around easily and mix, leading to the lack of any unified identity. With the land/mountain route severely constrained, Greece turned to the only available option – the sea. The Aegean Sea. More on that later. The mountainous terrain meant no invader could control all of Greece – from Rome to Persia to the Ottomans to the Balkan states to the British. But the strategic value of control of the Aegean Sea meant all those empires would vie for rule over Greece. Greece, thus, was never an independent nation, even as recentl...

In the last blog , we saw how Gladstone’s analysis seemed to suggest that the Homerian Greeks were colour blind. Lazarus Geiger came to a similar conclusion when he went over the Vedas – the ancient Indians seemed colour blind too, as were the Old Testament era folks. No word for blue, for example. The Icelandic sage and the Koran share some of these characteristics, writes Guy Deutscher in Through the Language Glass .   Therefore, concluded Geiger, all of mankind must have been colour blind (relative to us today) in that era (Ancient Egypt didn’t fit in: they used blue paint and even had a name for it. But they were considered the exception to the rule). But how does one check if this colour blindness theory was true? ~~   Enter Hugo Magnus, a Prussian ophthalmologist. His contribution was facilitated by events which made the topic of colour detection a practically important topic, not just a philosophical musing.   In 1875, two Swedish trains had a mass...

Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass , is a very interesting book. Simply put, the question it explores is this (controversial) one: “Do different languages lend their speakers to different perspectives? Is our particular language a lens through which we view the world?” In other words, is language a neutral medium? Or does language influence the way we see/think of the world?   Common sense would suggest that: “Each culture is free to bestow labels onto concepts as it pleases, but the concepts behind these labels have been formed by the dictates of nature.” No language, surely, would have a term that includes both birds and stones, since they are so obviously unrelated and non-overlapping physical concepts. No child, learning a language, ever asks, “How do I know if this is a cat or a dog?” Distinct terms for obviously distinct physical things in the real world.   Except… that isn’t entirely true. Take the arm and the hand. Or the hand and the fing...

Ian Leslie starts of his article with something everyone experiences: “Being influenced by others is inevitable and essential. But it’s also true that when we over-conform to influences, we surrender individuality. ” A balance is needed. Easier said than done: “Be impervious to social influence and you get closed off from the best that your fellow humans have to offer. Be defenceless against it and you become easily manipulable, boring, and unhappy. ”   But do we have the term “influence” all backwards? Consider this long (but totally worth reading) passage by Michael Baxandall: “If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than that Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality…. If we think of Y rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is much richer and more attractively diversified: draw on, resort to, avail oneself of, appropriate from,...

We saw this Hindi movie on the Maratha king, Shivaji named Raja Shivaji at the theatre. To be honest, my knowledge of Shivaji is entirely based on Amar Chitra Katha ’s (ACK’s), I don’t remember anything from my (school) history books.   The move is very so-so, but several things made the experience interesting.   Since the central character is a beloved figure in Maharashtra, the movie starts with the customary disclaimer on being part fictionalization, edited for entertainment, not meant to hurt religious or regional sentiments etc. The usual stuff. What was different was that the disclaimer was a whole page long! So what, you say, who reads them. Aha, this one was read out for all to hear! At breakneck speed. With words nobody uses in day-to-day life. It was taking forever to complete. We were beginning to dread that they’d follow this with a translated English reading, but thankfully that didn’t happen. ~~   I struggled with the first 45 minutes of the m...