Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously is perhaps the most famous sentence in all of Linguistics, given by Noam Chomsky to demonstrate the difference between syntax and semantics—a perfectly grammatical sentence with no understandable meaning, as Wikipedia describes it. I was reminded of it today when I was listening to the song Aazaadiyaan from the movie Udaan. Back in 1985, a competition was held at Stanford where participants were asked to provide a paragraph or verse that could give enough context to make this sentence meaningful.

This is a quick note rather than an elaborate post—I was eating at Shakti (the Women’s Cell run lunch center at IITB) yesterday when a group sitting next to me was discussing what they perceived as a semantic ambiguity. The issue was the right term for the Swedish Embassy situated in India. Would it be the Indian Swedish Embassy, or the Swedish Indian Embassy? From what I observed, opinion was divided, but I wasn’t sure whether both sides really computed different meanings or whether one was just trying to play the Devil’s Advocate, trying to defend what might originally have been a mistaken utterance.

I am surprised I didn’t come across this much earlier. Jonathan Swift, a very renowned essayist, poet, satirist, popularly known as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, wrote: If you want to read it yourself, you can do so here, but I would advise against it. There isn’t much to be gained, and he’s written too much. Jonathan Swift was an intelligent man, and a pretty good writer, so read up his other stuff if you want.

[This article has undergone a few edits after being published. I see that the whole discussion is revolving around issues peripheral to the theme of the post. In this post, I am denouncing the concept of purity being attached to Sanskritized Hindi, so I have removed bits I care less about and which are not directly relevant to the issue.] 14th September is celebrated in India as Hindi Divas (हिंदी दिवस).

You may have observed that most speakers of Hindi pronounce ऋ as essentially रि [rɪ] thus pronouncing words like ऋषभ or कृषि or आकृति as रिषभ, क्रिषि and आक्रिति respectively while speakers of Marathi and Gujarati pronounce it as रु [rʊ] thus saying रुषभ, क्रुषि and आक्रुती. It is a completely different matter that most Hindi speakers do not pronounce ष as a distinct sound. They use the same sound for ष and श, roughly the voiceless post-alveolar fricative, which also explains why most of us spent a lot of sweat and blood in memorizing when a word had श and when it had ष—there were no phonetic clues to differentiate between what was essentially a spelling distinction.

[This is the continuation of a series of articles on Languages and Linguistics that I am writing for a magazine for school kids, EducationEdge, that a friend of mine has started recently. These articles are targeted at students of classes VIII to XII. I will keep posting those articles on Linguistrix once they are published. The first article can be found here.] In the previous article, I introduced you to Linguistics and discussed a few examples from various fields within this discipline.

[I am writing a series of articles on Languages and Linguistics for a magazine for school kids, EducationEdge, that a friend of mine has started recently. These articles are targeted at students of classes VIII to XII. I will keep posting those articles on Linguistrix once they are published. Here's the first in the series.] “Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Every human possesses an innate ability to acquire language.

This blog has been in the proverbial pipeline for the past 3–4 months now, and after spending a lot of time on possible names, I finalized what was actually the first name that came to my mind—Linguistrix. I won’t explain the funda—if you don’t get it, it isn’t anything great anyway. Anyhow, the blog’s all set up, and I will hopefully start posting soon. This blog apparently supports LaTeX off the fly!