General

There’s been a lot of media buzz lately about an “Indian PhD student at Cambridge University” solving a “2,500-year-old Sanskrit puzzle”. Here are a few examples of recent press coverage—The BBC, The Hindu, Indian Express. If you’ve read one you’ve read them all because they are basically all copy-pastas of each other. Unfortunately the coverage is pretty scant on details, so I thought I’d provide a quick primer for those interested in understanding what the whole thing is about.

I was in Mexico last week and was quite excited to try my Spanish there. I studied some Spanish 3–4 years ago using Michel Thomas courses, and did a few levels on Duolingo, and combined with my French, I can get a general sense of simple written Spanish, but I had literally zero on-ground speaking experience. There are plenty of Spanish speakers in California, so it’s not difficult at all to find people to chat with if you really care, but it somehow never happened.

Arpan suggested that I review Arrival, a SciFi movie that has as its lead character—wait for it—a linguistics professor. I first thought of writing a review without spoilers but realized that it’d be impossible to write about the linguistically relevant parts of the movie without giving it all away, so I scrapped that plan. This review specifically addresses only and all linguistic aspects of the movie, so it might feel like nitpicking if you are not interested in all that stuff.

RVC recently told me about Through the Language Glass, a book by Guy Deutscher (GD), an Israeli linguist, that is based around the premise of ‘linguistic relativity’. Ordinarily, hearing those two words together evokes a bit of a fight / flight response in me, so I read the excerpts he sent with some trepidation. I realized that, far from being yet another piece fawning over linguistic relativity, this book actually seemed to be addressing many questions I had about this topic but had never seen properly answered.

I have a lot of interest in writing systems, which is why you will find a lot of posts on this blog around them. A few years ago, I wrote about the Bharati script, which was touted as an attempt to create a universal script for Indian languages. I had expressed measured skepticism about the idea, but had also said I would like to see the script, and luckily, was contacted by Chetan Shenoy, an undergrad from IIT Madras, who works under Prof Chakravarthy, the creator of the script.

I recently set the ‘question paper’ for the Hindi Word Games General Championship (GC) 1 at IIT Bombay. Here are the links to the question set and the solutions. As part of the competition, I decided to put in a round of Hindi Cryptic Puzzles. Cryptic Crosswords are very popular in English, but haven’t got much of a traction in the Hindi world. Regular crossword puzzles are fairly common—I remember solving the crossword in the Dainik Bhaskar growing up, but cryptics are relatively unchartered territory.

Pranav Mistry was one of the speakers at IIT Bombay’s Techfest this year. He rose to fame in 2010 for his TED Talk on Sixth Sense, a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with it (Description sourced from his website). Since then, he has been in and out of limelight, and has generally been on the receiving end of a lot of (well deserved) love and admiration from Indians, especially because he comes off as a ‘son of the soil’.

A couple of days ago, I came across a few news reports that a professor from IIT Madras (Professor V Srinivas Chakravarthy) has developed a script (called Bharati) to “unify 22 Indian languages”. As a script-enthusiast, I was of course slightly interested. There is a lot of self-congratulatory rhetoric in India about how Indian scripts are very ‘scientific’. On the contrary, the English script (which, in most cases, is the only other kind of script most Indians know) is criticized for being arbitrary, ambiguous, unscientific, what have you.

A comic that was doing the rounds a few months ago keeps getting revived every once in a while when it gets discovered by a new bunch of people. The comic shows Yoda ordering pizza over the phone, but unable to get his order across because of his mangled word order. It’s difficult to not feel pity for the battered Yoda shown in the last frame as he sits biting on a sandwich.

A few days ago, I saw an Onion Tech Trends video: HP Offers ‘That Cloud Thing Everyone Is Talking About. The whole video is funny, but what really cracked me up was when the HP spokesman says, at 1:32, We have App. Evidently, many other people found it funny too—the top comment on the YouTube video makes a reference to that statement, and a quick search I did on Google showed me that this particular line was tweeted and written about quite a bit when the video was launched.