ABOUT

Hi, I'm Shriram Rajagopal. Most of what I read and write about comes back to the same questions: How do languages move through history? Who carried those languages across the globe? What did they bring with themselves? And what did they leave behind?

I grew up in a household where the stories of Hindu tradition were a part of daily life. That gave me an early sense of the idea that a single culture can have such a rich history. In elementary school I, like many others out there, found myself interested in other mythologies of all sorts, including Greek, Roman, Norse, Egyptian. In seventh grade I started Latin, and that added to my general interest in ancient culture. Analyzing another language allows you to see the world in new ways, especially when our lingua franca just so happens to have a great number of derivatives from that language.

More recently, my interests have shifted toward linguistics and philology, including (but not limited to) how languages are structured, how they evolve over time, and how their spread relates to trade routes, migrations, and conquest. Sanskrit is a part of this, as I pick up on the connections shared between Latin and Sanskrit as Indo-European languages. I'm also interested in the archaeological side of this, as the material evidence informs us where language contact actually takes place.

Ex Verbis, meaning "From Words," is where I investigate all of this. The full title is Ex Verbis: Aeternitas Cogitationis, so as a whole it is: "From Words: An Eternity of Thought." This title hints at the idea that language is what allowed humans to think abstractly in the first place. This blog covers linguistics, philology, ancient history, philosophy, and whatever else I can ultimately connect to language. (Side note for the Latin grammarians, ex typically becomes e before a consonant, but E Verbis doesn't look quite as nice as a domain name...)