Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

09 Apr 2002, 14:38 p.m.

I had never noticed until Professor McWhorter pointed it out…

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

I had never noticed until Professor McWhorter pointed it out today that the word "Malayalam" is a palindrome! (Malayalam is a language of Southern India. It's in the Dravidian family, along with my parents' tongue (Kannada) and Tamil and Telugu.)