A language is both an invention and suspension associated with survival and pleasant adjustment 🙂 within some bounded space. It’s what cultures create and where they live. Of approximately 7,000 living languages extant, we lose a few each month and with them go the self-concepts and perceptions that characterized their creation and existence. For we “earthlings”, one might say we don’t know what we’re missing, or, more importantly, we may not access what has disappeared when it may have been most helpful to have had it around.

To achieve a peaceful cultural polyphony, if that’s wanted — and so Hebrews may go on speaking Hebrew and Arabs Arabic — accommodating modern transitional invention or remixing from the cultural inventory and history may be as helpful as it should be natural. There’s plenty of work ahead for poets, the engineers of the cultural soul.

Credit Qanta Ahmed with bringing this video, the source inspiration for the above note, to my attention this morning:

TED Talk: Suzanne Talhouk: Don’t kill your language

We need all of us but those who would convert, subjugate, or kill whole worlds with the grandiose ambition to rule the earth as if there were none but themselves to bask in God’s exclusive reflection.

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