"The more you know, the more you know you don't know."

Often attributed to Aristotle, there is no direct evidence that he said this. According to a post on Philosophy Stack Exchange, Aristotle believes that all things are knowable, but in a specific individual’s journey towards complete knowledge, there will be times that new knowledge shows there are more things to learn¹ (from Bing AI search). 

Me and Desmond Lazaro

As I was soaking up the sunshine in Cherry Hinton Rec, a gent sat next to me on the bench after kindly asking if he may. I couldn't quite place what he spoke to his kids, so in a quiet moment I asked him. He said it was Urdu, and it took little prompting for him to tell me it's a sort of universal language spoken in 15 to 30 countries throughout West Asia and the Middle East (WAME) and assorted diaspora. He said that lingua franca started as a means for (pre-Partition) Indian royalty to communicate with ragtag mercenaries and armies from all over WAME. 

My interlocutor was from Hyderabad and Kerala. The latter is the intriguing part of Indian SW coast colonised by the Portuguese around Goa and by the French around Pondicherry. I don't have his photo, but I posted that of Desmond Lazaro originally of Pondicherry, more here.

He then proceeded to tell me how many languages, spoken and written, there were in the Indian Subcontinent since 4 to 6000 years ago - note how imprecise his number are, as in the number of countries above - and much to my surprise I learned something about Arabic. He said that Chinese, Japanese and Korean are symbolic languages, but that Sanskrit and Arabic aren't - the latter is what Urdu is written in - he opined they were a unifying mode of communication, in that no matter how you spoke it among the 20 official and hundreds unofficial languages in WAME, what you wrote meant was was written, and not some dialect variation. 

Not to verify it or to scrutinise academically, suffice it to say this is not was I was told by a single British friend - converted to Islam and moved to Kuwait then Dubai - who translated my Kuwaiti contract that he said held no water: he warned me the text could be interpreted differently, and sure enough I quit after 15 mo. because I left part of my salary on the table - effectively paying my taxes to my boss not the government, as I was paid cash-in-hand - due to said variances. 

From that and chatting with a few fast local friends, I expounded here about merit-based tribal vs. fact-based common law system, borrowing vs. stealing and truthing vs. lying differing among eastern vs. western cultures respectively. What I learned today is more nuancing: On one hand, for example the Koran written in classic Arabic is uniform and immutable (as I understand it); on the other hand, the Bible went thru so many translations in Greek, Hebrew and Latin alphabets, that the result is in effect a symbolic text, where the meaning changes with the author... so let the exegesis begin!

At least that's what I 'get' as at today: as a Quaker I will consider the possibility of being wrong; go back to the title...