Etymological Remorse

This is one of those things which we never notice even though it always right under our nose. It took this column to show me the obvious.

" “Loot,” the noun and the verb, is a word of Hindi origin meaning the spoils of war or other goods seized roughly. As historian Peter Linebaugh points out, “At one time loot was the soldier’s pay.” It entered the English language as a good deal of loot from India entered the English economy, both in soldiers’ pockets and as imperial seizures."

This is not about opening up old wounds but rather I am happy that  Brit's lack cognitive dissonance on this front and it's laudable.
I simply couldn't connect the dots in spite of knowing Hindi, English and Tamil well. The reason I am bringing this up because there was a report on Scientific American last Friday on "The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages" .

"The ability to speak a second language isn’t the only thing that distinguishes bilingual people from their monolingual counterparts—their brains work differently, too. Research has shown, for instance, that children who know two languages more easily solve problems that involve misleading cues. A new study published in Psychological Science reveals that knowledge of a second language—even one learned in adolescence—affects how people read in their native tongue. The findings suggest that after learning a second language, people never look at words the same way again.

Eva Van Assche, a bilingual psychologist at the Univer sity of Ghent in Belgium, and her colleagues recruited 45 native Dutch-speaking students from their university who had learned English at age 14 or 15. The researchers asked the participants to read a collection of Dutch sentences, some of which included cognates—words that look similar and have equivalent meanings in both lan guages (such as “sport,” which means the same thing in both Dutch and English). They also read other sen tences containing only noncognate words in Dutch.

Van Assche and her colleagues recorded the participants’ eye move ments as they read. They found that the subjects spent, on average, eight fewer milliseconds gazing at cognate words than control words, which suggests that their brains processed the dual-language words more quickly than words found only in their native language.

“The most important implication of the study is that even when a per son is reading in his or her native language, there is an influence of knowledge of the nondominant second language,” Van Assche notes. “Becoming a bilingual changes one of people’s most automatic skills.” She plans to investigate next whether people who are bilingual also process auditory language information differently. “Many questions remain,” she says."

Instead of feeling great pride in speaking not just 2 but 3 languages, I felt there was something amiss. For starters then most Indians should be geniuses since most of them speak two languages and its obvious that not the case. Yes, there are many unanswered questions. Developing an apt Broca Area surely has immense benefits but may be it comes with other hidden costs (like I missing the "duh" in "loot").