TOK situations for knowledge and language
How the language available to a knower shapes what can be expressed, distinguished and thought, and what happens to knowledge in translation, metaphor and technical vocabulary.
- East Asia
Simplifying the characters
Mainland China's simplified characters raised literacy while severing visual links to older texts that Taiwan and Hong Kong retain, so the same classical…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- Southeast Asia
The orchestra with no score
Javanese gamelan is learned by sitting in the ensemble and absorbing it, with written notation used as a reminder rather than a source. A player knows their…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- East Asia
An alphabet designed for everyone
King Sejong's fifteenth-century promulgation of Hangul gave Korean a script learnable in days, against the years Chinese characters demanded, and literate…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- India
The script nobody can read
Thousands of short inscriptions survive from the Indus Valley civilisation, yet after a century of attempts, no decipherment commands consensus, and scholars…
Enduring · History
- Certainty
- Interpretation
- Africa
Cloth you can read
Akan kente patterns carry names, proverbs and histories, so a cloth worn to a funeral says something specific to those who can read it. Sold internationally as…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- India
Binary patterns in Sanskrit prosody
Pingala's ancient treatise on Sanskrit poetic metre enumerates syllable patterns in ways that parallel binary representation and combinatorial rules formalised…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Explanation
- Culture
- Latin America
Records tied in knots
Inca administration ran on quipus, cords whose knots encoded census and tribute data and possibly narrative, and Spanish authorities destroyed many precisely…
Enduring · History · Mathematics
- Interpretation
- Culture
- The Middle East and North Africa
Cracking hieroglyphs against a bilingual stone
Champollion's decipherment of hieroglyphs leaned on the Rosetta Stone's parallel texts and his knowledge of Coptic, and the proof was predictive: readings…
Enduring · History
- Justification
- Interpretation
- India
Drumming you can speak
Tabla players learn compositions as spoken syllables, bols, before ever touching the drum, and can recite an entire piece aloud. The syllable is the unit of…
Enduring · The arts
- Explanation
- Culture
- Southeast Asia
A language that changed its alphabet
Vietnam's shift to the Latin-based quoc ngu under colonial influence enabled mass literacy campaigns, and within generations most Vietnamese could no longer…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- Global
Languages the machines skip
Machine translation is strong between data-rich languages and weak or absent for thousands of others, so speakers of low-resource languages get worse search,…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- Global
The encyclopedia's uneven world
Wikipedia's English edition dwarfs most others, and topics rich in one language sit as stubs or absences in another, so the same person consulting the same…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture