anik's blog - Memos

North Indian languages may have evolved as creoles

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 10:47:33 GMT

North Indian languages may have evolved as creoles

I’m reading Father Land, Motherlands by Peggy Mohan.

Mohan argues that many South Asian languages are not simple descendancts of older parent languages like Sanskrit.

Rather, many of them may have evolved as creoles. In a process in which they took the vocabulary of Indo-European languages brought in my male mogrants (like Sanskrit), and intermixed it with the grammar of local (Dravidian) languages.

Which, Mohan says, explains why modern north Indian languages have different grammatical structures than other Indo-European languages.

#language #india

The subjective experience of having personal agency may be illusory

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:18:06 GMT

The subjective experience of having personal agency may be illusory

Vsauce Explains How Consciousness May Have Come About

I really liked this discussion between Alex O’Connor and Michael Stevens on what consciousness is. And how cultural conceptions of it may have evolved over time.

Steven talks about Julian Jaynes’s Bicameral Mind Theory, which claims that early humans, prior to around 1000 BC, did not possess self-aware consciousness as we know it. (This was new for me. On the surface, I find it difficult to believe. But it’s an interesting hypothesis nonetheless.)

I found the video interesting because the discussion was tangential to some of the things that have been on my mind lately. About how the control which our conscious, narrative self feels over our actions is largely illusory.

#self-identity #philosophy #bookmark/YouTube

I need a place to dump my thoughts, because there are too many things cluttering up my mind

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:20:58 GMT

I need a place to dump my thoughts, because there are too many things cluttering up my mind

I have way too many things to do, and too many things on my mind.

My mind is more cluttered than my hostel room in college used to be. A lot of it is because of work. I’m context switching all through the day. And rarely able to get any deep work done.

So I had been thinking of trying to dump things — things on my mind — somewhere. And that’s what this is gonna be for. Hopefully.

#rant