Viswanathan K's Thoughts

At the end of Through the Language Glass , Guy Deutscher points out that colour, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. As is well known, the eye has rods and cones. Colour perception is because of the cones. In humans, we have 3 different types of cones which can detect 3 separate colours – red, blue and green (RGB). Only those three, nothing else. How then do we “see” so many other colours?   Well, if light happens to activate both red and green cones with equal intensity, it gets interpreted as yellow. Put differently, we are not capable of detecting if a light is “truly” yellow or just a combo of equal intensity red and green! So all those non-RGB colours we are able to see? It’s just a combo of those three colours we can detect (RGB) combined in different intensities (ratios).   In fact, colour TV’s use just this point. They (like our eye) only support 3 different colours (RGB). By varying the intensities of those three colours at each pixel on the screen, ...

Tomas Pueyo wrote a great post on Saudi Arabia, informative on so many fronts. “Saudi Arabia is the biggest country in the world with no rivers! It only has wadis, ephemeral river beds that only occasionally carry water after rain.” Sure, everyone knows about the sand and desert , but did you know: “ The sand is so sandy that there are dunes up to 250 m high!” It is also rocky and mountainous on one side. Did you know the mountains are so tall that it even snows there?   From the above pic, you’d also notice the country is next to two major sea routes – the Red Sea on the left (west) and the Persian Gulf on the top (north). The coastal areas have also been on the trade routes with the corresponding opportunities for enrichment. Which is why you find so many different countries along those coasts:   Based on all this, you’d expect only the coastal areas to be the well-known cities of Saudi Arabia. And yes, Mecca, Medina and Jeddah lie close to the coast. But not the capital, ...

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...