Conquering the conquerors

I've noticed a pattern in history of the conquered becoming the conqueror. I can think of several manifestations. The first is Rome and the Germanic tribes that harried its frontier. In time these tribes would take Rome's place but carry its torch. This is what happened with the Franks in France, retaining the language and many of the institutions of Rome, as well as what would happen in the general area of modern day Germany, in the form of the Holy Roman Empire.

The two other outstanding cases that occur to me carry us across Eurasia. During the Islamic conquests, it was Arab power structures that subsumed and converted Persians. In time, however, Persians came to dominate the power structure, in the administration of the Abbasid Caliphate. In turn, those ethnicities then on the periphery - nomadic Turks and Mongols - would go from populations encroached on or pushed back to the new rulers of extensive, urbanized domains. This brings us to China, where the Mongols established the Yuan dynasty, ruling over their former suzerain for a hundred years.

Could there be something fundamental to these three examples? It only makes sense that in time the wealth accumulated in a society would become the prize of a new contingent of people. It might not be a meaningful abstraction that I've presented at all. For instance, wealth and power were changing hands among groups within Rome. Is that really any different from it passing into the hands of, say, the Lombards? At the same time, there are many distinct groups that have never "conquered their conquerors."

Some thoughts and language on thought and language

I don't think in English. Sometimes I think in Russian. Sometimes I think in images or something like a scene from a movie where many non-verbal aspects of a situation develop and play out. My thoughts used to be more closely coupled to their representation in spoken English, particularly early on in college, where my main mode of digesting information and expressing myself had become the word. This was in contrast to how I'd spent much of my free time in high school -- drawing for hours. And later in college I would focus more heavily on a different symbolic system - mathematical notation - as I undertook more coursework in statistics and econometrics. The cumulative effect of these experiences has left me with thoughts that aren't dominated by any particular medium. Sometimes I'm rehearsing a conversation in my head. At other times, I'm thinking in a sort of raw mode of concepts themselves, without their being tied to their corresponding word in English or Russian, or I might be visualizing shapes interacting with each other in a kind of space, such as when working with a matrix of data for work.

Now I don't overestimate how unique this is. It's often a matter of degree. That said, I have encountered multiple instances where others describe their cognition in contrast to mine. A parallel can be drawn in the different ways people read. Many people subvocalize when they read, registering minute movements of the physical pronunciation of words as their eyes pass over them, perhaps hearing the words in their heads. An alternative mode of reading doesn't involve subvocalization, and can become a largely visual experience. This likely typifies the reading experience for those who've learned only the written form of a language. Think scholars who've learned enough of a language only to use written sources in their work, or who are working with a dead language, the spoken form of which is no longer known.

A number of these concepts are explored in The Arrival, a movie that left a strong impression on me: the mapping of spoken to visually-represented language, how the mode of thinking dictates what is even possible to think. We benefit from a long history of packaging up concepts into a shorthand representation. There was a time when we didn't have the means to represent or conceive of numbers. Imagine how greatly extended our ability to manipulate our worlds - internal and external - has become. If I'm recalling a documentary I once saw accurately, and if it was accurate itself, Einstein expressed that one of the greatest challenges in his work as a physicist was finding the means to capture what he'd already conceptualized. This leads me to believe that for all its expressive capacity, dealing solely with language as we've inherited it can keep us from expanding the realms of personal - or more generally, human - insight. I wonder what future developments in language will afford us.