I had an interesting conversation with a Greek colleague. I had not realised how much a knowledge of Greek offers a leverage over English as well. Though I have come across etymology of English words traced to the Greek roots, I suppose I never inferred that an actual Greek person would be able to catch deeper meanings in a word where to me the word was just a static symbol for one meaning. We were talking generally about what actions might be perceived as ethical or not, and he gave me the example of what if a person called somebody an idiot. I said if they were just stating a fact, it might not be unethical? To which he said that 'idiot' in Greek is more like someone who has been ostracized from the community. He then gave me the word 'barbarian'. Apparently the 'baar baar' was the sound the Greeks thought non-Greeks made when they spoke. Onomatopoeic. Hence the '’bar’ ‘bar’ -ian'.

All this makes me think of the Chinese language which I am getting to know from the ground up these days. This language system is nothing like any other I know, even Indian ones. Normally you string different alphabets with specific sounds together, and by the way you do it, you make a word which sounds like the alphabets would sound together. Every word has a meaning which could be slightly nuanced in a sentence. But Chinese is like a big box of pictures and sounds. Some pictures can be mixed with other pictures to mean something. Like this is the picture/character for a woman 女 and this for a child 子. The picture character for ‘good’ is their combination 好. This ‘good’ is the 'hao' in 'ni hao' which if you are familiar with Chinese greetings is used to say 'hello'. But what it literally means is 'you good?'. I kind of feel it would be helpful if we are told the term means 'you good?' because then one knows what ni means and what hao means. And it isn't odd at all because English people commonly greet with 'you alright?'. The point I was driving towards is that the Chinese character sort of embeds a historical record of its own evolution, its meaning associations, and so on. With English, all you have is a bare word. But that same word for a Greek person is almost like the Chinese character with numerous associations. They encounter a whole history in it which the rest of us are blind to.

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Pic: Zhāng lao shī shared pieces of paper with our names in Chinese...