I like being right
Dec. 5th, 2011 07:24 pmSo one of the contestants on Jeopardy! today is someone named Bhibha. And of course my first thought is 'that's odd, her name violates Grassman's Law'1: famously, Sanskrit didn't allow two aspirated consonants in the same word. But hey, I know nothing about what phonological or analogical changes might have happened between Sanskrit and the modern Indic languages; for all I know maybe Grassman's Law no longer applies.
Then in the contestant-anecdote section of the show after the first commercial break, Bhibha's anecdote was about how her father spelled her name wrong on her birth certificate—he added an extra "h". Grassman's Law wins again!
1 Yes, this was actually my first thought.
Then in the contestant-anecdote section of the show after the first commercial break, Bhibha's anecdote was about how her father spelled her name wrong on her birth certificate—he added an extra "h". Grassman's Law wins again!
1 Yes, this was actually my first thought.