Viswanathan K's Thoughts

As a kid, I struggled a lot with the assignment of gender to non-living things in Hindi. Neither of the other languages I knew (Tamil and English) have that concept, and it always felt weird why किताब (book) should have any gender. Even worse, there didn’t seem to be any logic to the assignment of gender.   English is an outlier in not assigning genders, says Guy Deutscher in Through the Language Glass . Most European languages (French, German) assign genders. On the other hand, several languages don’t even have words for ‘he’ and ‘she’! Like Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Vietnamese. Worst of all (confirming my childhood grouse on Hindi), most languages that assign genders to non-living objects don’t follow any pattern.   If a language loses gender words (he/she/it), well, it depends on which word(s) was lost. Spanish, French and Italian lost the “it” word (for non-living things) and so everything had to be male or female. Losing a gender word added to ...

Does a language influence how and even what its users think (or don’t think)? At first glance, this seems ridiculous. Even if a language doesn’t have a word for a concept, surely users will just describe the concept using a group of words when needed, right? The absence of a word definitely does not mean that users of a language don’t know or understand the associated concept, reiterates Guy Deutscher in Through the Language Glass .   Wilhelm von Humbldt explained that the point of the above question was more nuanced, i.e., to check “what (a language) encourages and simulates its speakers to do from its own inner force”. Max Muller said something similar: “The words in which we think are channels of thought which we have not dug ourselves, but which we found ready made for us!” Bertrand Russell expressed this point even more strongly: “Language misleads us by its vocabulary and by its syntax. We must be on our guard in both respects if our logic is not to lead to false...

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...

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...

In the previous blog in the series, we saw all the difficulties in explaining the evolution of language. Now to one possible explanation, from A Brief History of Intelligence by Max Bennett.   The book goes into a seemingly unrelated topic, altruism . In all species, one can see altruism towards kin (children, siblings etc). Many species also show reciprocal altruism (you scratch my back, I scratch yours). Humans go far, far beyond both. People help strangers without any expectation. They give to charity and do philanthropy. At the same time, as a species, we can be outrageously cruel . Only humans do genocide, wipe out entire groups.   Back to the topic of language: “It is not a coincidence that our language, our unparalleled altruism and our unmatched cruelty all emerged together in evolution: all three were, in fact, merely different features of the same evolutionary feedback loop.” He elaborates.   Language may have started off as intended only for ...

In A Brief History of Intelligence , Max Bennett asks: “Is language an evolutionary invention or a cultural invention?” He investigates.   In the 1800’s, a scientist named Broca identified a region of the brain (called Broca’s area ) which was necessary to speak. People in whom that area was damaged could not speak anymore.   There was another kind of patient who could speak but the sentences made no sense whatsoever! Analysis identified damage to a part of the brain, and the condition was named Wernicke aphasia after the man who identified it.   Two different areas of the brain for understanding speech and for speaking . And they are wired together. Sounds like we found the reason why humans have speech, but not other species like apes. Unfortunately, that is not the case.   Turns out those 2 areas of the brain evolved in a common ancestor, i.e., even apes have Broca’s area and Wernicke area. So it was not the evolution of these 2 areas in the...

A t work, I remember being told to remember that we had translate our English UI to both Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. Separately – the two were that different. While reading Gaston Dorren’s Babel , I learnt that while the vocabulary is 99% common, the pronunciations are seriously different, so much so that it not even the same language anymore!   Dorren still counts them as one though (#7, 275 million speaker). Most of his chapter on Portuguese is about a question he asks himself: Why did Portuguese spread across the world (remember, it is 7 th in the most spoken languages list)? Whereas Dutch language hardly spread?   In fact, neither power tried actively to instill their language in their colonies (the French put a lot more effort on that front; and it never yielded proportional results. French is #10, 250 million). Nor is Portuguese an easier language to learn in any way (it is as hard or easy as any foreign language).   One reason is where they ...

My 10 yo daughter’s English was terrible. It drove us up a wall – it was not as if she knew other languages well (Tamil, Hindi, Kannada) and English was the weak spot. No, English was her strongest language, and even that sucked .   In despair, during this year’s summer holidays, we enrolled her in Kumon classes. In addition, we threw in a couple of other daily measures (read a book, one-page of writing, watch a National Geographic episode). One/some of them helped, and in just two months, her English has improved by leaps and bounds. ~~~   Though she is just 10, many of her friends are a couple of years older. Unfortunately, that means she has a teenager-like attitude already. In one of those moods, she announced that the world sucks. Upon which I helpfully asked if she planned shift to Mars, perhaps? Of course, she’d have to make some new friends there, I reminded. She immediately changed her mind, “Nah, I’ll continue to stay here only”. I commended her on her wil...

Over the past year, due to COVID-19, my 9 yo daughter has switched to a new group of friends in the apartment (One-line reason: You play with whoever comes down). As a result, her new group of friends is a motley collection of kids (at times, it even includes boys, something unimaginable in the pre-COVID era) in a wide-ranging age group of 7 to 15. And therein lie the origins of this blog.   The older kids know far better English and are good at, er, insulting. The younger ones, including my daughter, pick a bit of the English and all of the insults. And when we went into lockdown again, I got to experience everything she’d learnt. Terms of addressing like “bro”, “dude”, and the South Indian “ da ”. She used them tentatively with me at first (not “da” , the other two), testing the waters. But when I use those terms on her, she’ll snort: “Adults. Can’t use such words properly, and yet they won’t stop.”   Then there are those words which drive all parents up a wall. Ye...

Which technologies in history have had the most transformative impact? Venkatesh Rao, a tech blogger, lists these : “Electricity, steam power, precision clocks, written language, token currencies, iron metallurgy and agriculture.” That made me wonder why he said “written language” as opposed to just language. And then I remembered these points from different sources. James Gleick in his book, The Information , pointed out that “speech is too fleeting to allow for analysis”. He went on to point out that logical reasoning has “no power unless people can examine and evaluate them”. And he’s right: can you imagine confirming any theorem from geometry unless it was written down, allowing you to go over it at your own pace, to look back at a previous step in the chain of reasoning? Of course, the point extends beyond just the theorems of geometry: it applies to every logical chain of reasoning. From a different perspective, Paul Romer, in one of his blogs, wrote that : “Cle...

Why is the language of science English? I thought the answer to that question was the same as to why the language of the world is English: because the British ruled most of the planet. But that answer’s not true for science, argues Michael Gordin, a historian of science, in his book, Scientific Babel . Gordin points out how recently English took over the scientific world: “If you look around the world in 1900, and someone told you, 'Guess what the universal language of science will be in the year 2000', you would first of all laugh at them. It was obvious that no one language would be the language of science, but a mixture of French, German and English would be the right answer.” That actually makes sense. Sure, the British ruled the world, but the scientists were all in Europe, an area not exactly under British control! So why then has English become the dominant language of science since 1900? The short answer: the two World Wars. Now for the longer version....

Some (or maybe all?) schools teach kids to associate sounds with letters of the English alphabet; and then use that association later on to teach them spelling. Try doing that second part (spelling by sound association) in your head and you’ll be wondering how anyone who knows English thought that this idea could possibly work! After all, as John McWhorter wrote in this great article : “For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.” But wait, continues McWhorter, spoken English is no less weird: “It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet.” But we Indians can surely appreciate that part. Take gender association with objects in other languages, says McWhorter: “We think it’s a nuisance...

(This is the first in a series on how maths seems to be the language in which the rules of the universe have been written: the “MU” in this series titles stands for “Mathematical Universe”). Long, long ago, science could be done by “by watching your bathtub spill over” (as Sabine Hossenfelder put it). All that began to change when Galileo began to argue that “the keys to deciphering the universe’s parlance were mathematical relations and geometrical models”, as Mario Livio put it in his book, Is God a Mathematician? But it would have to wait until Isaac Newton until someone came up with mathematical relations to describe the universe. In the process, calculus had to be invented because, as Charles Seife puts it in his book, Zero , “calculus was the very language of nature”. From Newton onwards, all of physics has been stated in mathematical equations. So much so that when Richard Feynman was asked whether we could have a theorist today who was “not mathematically sophisti...

The ease and reasonable accuracy with which Google Translate translates words, sentences and paragraphs sometimes makes us forget how hard it is to translate entire books. So why is translating books so hard? The usual “culprit” is context: the background, cultural practices and accepted/expected behavioural norms of one language (and by extension, region) don’t apply in others. Context aside, some words have no equivalents in other languages. But contrary to what you might think, this article on “true untranslatability” says the issue is not the lack of one-to-one words: “The common trope that language X has no word for Y is usually useless (it usually means language X uses several words instead of one for Y).” It cites this great example: “shockingly specific single words in other languages like mamihlapinatapei, which is apparently Yagan for “the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start.” Bu...

The Internet is changing the language, what Megan Garber describes as “of-the-Internet, by-the-Internet movements of language”. Like when it added a new preposition to English: the word, “because” : “Because variety. Because Internet. Because language.” Or take how texting via those chat apps of the smartphone world has converted the “neutral” period (full-stop) into something more aggressive. As Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics, explains : “In the world of texting and IMing … the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all. In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like ‘This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.’” Or take how “LOL” which used to stand for “Laugh(ing) Out Loud” is now increasingly used to denote sarcasm in text. As Lucy Ferriss wrote : ...

I remember this old joke from the pre-Internet-is-everywhere era about how German (the language) could eventually rule the world if we gradually started improving the horrible no-method-in-the-madness spelling used in English. Some of the proposals in that joke were: -          use "s"  instead  of  the soft "c" e.g. "Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy"; -          replace the hard "c"  with "k" to "klear up konfusion"; -          replace "ph" with "f" thus making words like "fotograf" 20 per sent shorter; -          remove double letters, something that has "always ben  a deterent  to akurate  speling"; -          remove silent letters; Add a few more similar such rules and "ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl", the...

It seems to be the general trend in everything. The microprocessor-software combo seems to do most things that was done by humans much faster and way better. Except language. That’s one area that still resists the tech juggernaut. Items related to language, like translations and speech, seem too tough to crack. Let’s start with translation. Word Lens , an app developed for the iPhone, became very famous due to videos like this: Point your phone, take a picture and voila! The translated text appears. Awesome, isn’t it (even if it only worked between English and Spanish)? People certainly thought so and shelled out money to buy the app. Which is when the complaints started: the translations weren’t always right. Nor were they context sensitive. Google Translate creates and scans (massive) databases, and then applies algorithms to decide (guess?) which words mean the same thing in different languages. Now Google’s taken it to the next level by combing translations with speech recognition:...

“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein If what Wittgenstein said is true (and it sure sounds right), then by extension, a language that absorbs words into itself readily is indirectly absorbing the ideas that are associated with those words. On the other hand, a language that refuses to absorb words from other languages and instead coins new words loses the context and associations that were part of the source language. To see the point, imagine whether English speakers would have got the same ideas (philosophy?) that comes with words like karma and nirvana if they had insisted on coining new words for them, instead of taking them as-is. So the speakers/custodians who “safeguard” their language by not letting it get “corrupted” by foreign words end up losing the idea-set that comes with the original words. It’s like cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face! Maybe the French should wake up and take note. Of course...