Society & Culture
Are words valuable things? When did you last search for a word? Is the seed of language also the seed of the world? How does art work? Is direct (unmediated) observation possible? Does language have a (biological) organ that works with other cognitive faculties? What is a ‘word’? Does it have an internal structure? Do speakers find various affixes psychologically real? Why is there such a thing as grammar? Are words beginning-less? Does grammar change more slowly than words and phrases? Why? Where do art’s boundaries lie? Does art have a ‘universal grammar’? Does the (real) world determine the grammatical nature of languages? What propels the artistic in us? What does the word Saturn represent? Is the world described by words dissimilar from the world we inhabit? How are ungrammatical sentences sometimes meaningful? What is the link between truth and language? Might truth sometimes be observer dependent? Are there features in natural languages that are tied to our very Being? Is the Tunisian ants’ world discrete? What gives gestures meaning? &, what will Martians understand if/when they land on Earth with their own language? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from Sanskrit studies (Prof. Ashok Aklujkar, The University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver), art (Jeebesh Bagchi, Raqs Media Collective, New Delhi), & linguistics (Prof. Pritha Chandra, IIT Delhi, New Delhi). Listen in...