Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Two of the languages in Gaston Dorren’s Babel have an abnormally high political component to them.   The first one is Tamil (#18, 90 million speakers). While an ancient language, for a long time, he says, it has become very political. The language is considered sacred by many of its speakers. This adoration is a relatively recent phenomenon, starting off when British scholars started to study the language and old documents in the 1800’s. That showed that South India had been ruled by many mighty dynasties from the Pandyan to Cholas to Cheras. The newfound association of the language with such ancient and powerful empires triggered a surge of pride.   After independence, states were created on linguistic lines and multi-language Madras state got split. Tamil Nadu became the home of Tamilians only. Later day attempts to make Hindi the national language provoked outsized protests in the state and cemented the role and position of Tamil within the state.   And i...

Federalism. Center-state split of responsibilities and finances. To understand the right split for it, Karthik Muralidharan starts from first principles in Accelerating India’s Development .   What are the pros of being a large country? Large countries can have economies of scale – their economic size can be larger, tax from which makes for powerful armies which means they are less threatened by enemies. Large countries can spend more on defense investments, some of which may find civilian applications (think of satellites and the Internet). A large geographic size means a bigger market within one’s borders without the hassle of negotiating inter-country trade agreements. Natural disasters are limited in their scope; and people can move elsewhere. Conversely, the unimpacted parts of the country can supply the money to rebuild the impacted areas.   How about the cons of being a large country? Large countries will inevitably host diverse identities, but national policies...

There are around 6,000 languages in the world, writes Gaston Dorren in Babel . His book covers the top 20 spoken languages in an unsystematic manner. Understandable, since nobody can analyze so many diverse languages in the same way. That approach results in very different info about the languages. ~~   He tried learning Vietnamese (#20, 75 million speakers). Strangely, it uses the Roman script, even though 30 to 60% of its vocabulary comes from Chinese! It has an abnormally high diacritics (symbols on top of letters e.g. ć, ĉ, č, ē etc). Unlike English, its spellings match the pronunciations – thanks to all those diacritics. Like many East Asian languages, it is highly tonal (different vocalizations can change the meaning of words significantly). And like many Asian languages, there are lots of different personal pronouns – use the wrong one and you are being disrespectful. ~~   At #16, with 95 million speakers, comes Javanese . Never heard of it? That’s probabl...