This was my summer fascination as well! Involving a father again. His gift to me for the summer holidays. I’m told I speak like I read a thesaurus for leisure.. I guess it had a seeping in effect after all! Amused that it was a generational phenomenon!
Thanks for writing this Tanuj. Reminded me of how I got acquainted with this book - one was supposed to clear an MBA entrance exam to escape from core civil engineering job and 'vocab' was needed for it. Someone gave me this book saying that it had shortcuts to learn new words. Not sure if I still remember the words as a CAT aspirant would but it certainly made me interested in words in general. My foolish young self used to throw around the word 'etymology' a lot to impress people :P
Tanuj, I remember browsing through books like that. Indexed with prefixes like ad-and ab- and ex-. It totally made sense to me to learn what these Latin roots meant. It made life so much easier. It makes English so much easier to understand, when you know the Roman cobblestones over which the language was built, don’t you think? It was kind of nice that someone had put it all down in a very helpful book. Very thoughtful of them, I thought.
This kind of stuff has always given me a thrill, this whole business of digging down into languages and finding all kinds of beautiful connections, and borrowings, and strata. It’s like being an archeologist and discovering that it’s all about geography. “Mughal” connects me to the 16th century Chagtai-speakers of Afghanistan. Who in turn got their language from the Turkic speakers of Mongolia. The same folks whose descendants invaded Anatolia and brought Turkic to the country which now calls itself Turkey. (My favorite Turkic/Hindostani word—“bandook”.)
Today, of course, life is so much simpler. You don’t even need a book. I just YouTube it. Want to know how similar Persian and Gujarati sound? There’s a nice video with an Iranian gentleman and a Gujarati woman in a room, trying to guess what certain words in the other’s language mean. Want to know how the Sumerian cuneiform script works? There’s a talk at the Royal Institution by a professor who looks like a descendant of Charles Darwin. It’s beautiful. I love being alive in the third decade of the 21st century.
Thanks for writing this. I too had a stint with the book as a CAT aspirant. I found the essay very delightful.
And the line "The present was to be burnt in its service". So true.
This was my summer fascination as well! Involving a father again. His gift to me for the summer holidays. I’m told I speak like I read a thesaurus for leisure.. I guess it had a seeping in effect after all! Amused that it was a generational phenomenon!
Norman Lewis. There was this one book about a Spanish village before the tourism boom consumed it which I remember are quite good.
Thanks for writing this Tanuj. Reminded me of how I got acquainted with this book - one was supposed to clear an MBA entrance exam to escape from core civil engineering job and 'vocab' was needed for it. Someone gave me this book saying that it had shortcuts to learn new words. Not sure if I still remember the words as a CAT aspirant would but it certainly made me interested in words in general. My foolish young self used to throw around the word 'etymology' a lot to impress people :P
Yes, I think we all had similar reasons to come to it. I vaguely remember that it started with prefixed. Ab-, ex-, ad-, and so on.
Tanuj, I remember browsing through books like that. Indexed with prefixes like ad-and ab- and ex-. It totally made sense to me to learn what these Latin roots meant. It made life so much easier. It makes English so much easier to understand, when you know the Roman cobblestones over which the language was built, don’t you think? It was kind of nice that someone had put it all down in a very helpful book. Very thoughtful of them, I thought.
This kind of stuff has always given me a thrill, this whole business of digging down into languages and finding all kinds of beautiful connections, and borrowings, and strata. It’s like being an archeologist and discovering that it’s all about geography. “Mughal” connects me to the 16th century Chagtai-speakers of Afghanistan. Who in turn got their language from the Turkic speakers of Mongolia. The same folks whose descendants invaded Anatolia and brought Turkic to the country which now calls itself Turkey. (My favorite Turkic/Hindostani word—“bandook”.)
Today, of course, life is so much simpler. You don’t even need a book. I just YouTube it. Want to know how similar Persian and Gujarati sound? There’s a nice video with an Iranian gentleman and a Gujarati woman in a room, trying to guess what certain words in the other’s language mean. Want to know how the Sumerian cuneiform script works? There’s a talk at the Royal Institution by a professor who looks like a descendant of Charles Darwin. It’s beautiful. I love being alive in the third decade of the 21st century.