Alex Rose writes about the strength of the English language and problems when people reject their language heritage in favor of this growing, global tongue. “Indeed, English is a veritable cabinet of wonders, a palimpsest of criss-crossing lexical histories, no less than a modern linguistic juggernaut,” he writes, noting a book by Robert McCrum called Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language
The second half of Rose’s article talks about the fears some have of losing knowledge and culture when small languages are lost. Languages reveal how men can think and organize the world around them. Some times the obscure words reveal an intimate relationship with a part of nature English speakers do not have. Rose notes, “The Kayapo people, for instance, have developed 85 different words for ‘bee,’ each specifying minute differences in flight patterns, mating rituals, habitat, nest structures, and quality of wax.”
On this part, I want to criticize materialists or naturalists for rejecting divine revelation as a source of real knowledge. If the world is all we have and we are the only ones who can glean anything from it, then I preserving cultures, languages, and everything else makes some sense. The article quotes Noam Chomsky on this: “by studying the properties of natural languages, their structure, organization, and use, we may hope to learn something about human nature; something significant, if it is true that human cognitive capacity is the truly distinctive and most remarkable characteristic of the species.” I can see that, if mankind is but one of many species. If we are just a remarkably unique animals, top of our food chain as it were, then we should seek out linguistic info like this in order to understand ourselves as much as possible.
But we are men, male and female, created in the image of God Almighty, who made heaven and earth for his glory and our enjoyment. The Kayapo people may have a cool thing going in naming bees, but the Bible will reveal far more about humanity than their language ever will.
Seems to me that the Kayapo and the bees are an absurd example. The threat to their 85 words for “bee” isn’t the adoption of English; it’s the abandonment of a way of life in which close observation of bees is necessary for survival. They can certainly pull some or all of those words into English if they really need them.
And if they abandon those words because as a people they are no longer so dependent on bees, I can only regard that as a good thing.
There are other examples in the article and more in the book, but I think this is all the preservationists really have. They point to differences as rare gems and plead for an unrealistic conservationism of living, changing things, which I think shows the poverty of their worldview.
I’m not sure the worldview leap is merited. “All who see some value in understanding obscure languages are ignorant of the revealed wisdom of Scriptures” seems a sentiment with profound anti-intellectual consequences. It also seems to be what you imply.
A historian of Constantinople in the 8th Century will emphasize the unique insights studying such a period could provide to the modern reader. A nuclear physicist studying string theory might wax poetic about the “elegant universe.” An English medievalist might long for Nordic concepts of courage and honor. Are all those modes of inquiry similarly made antiquated and irrelevant by the fact that a Christian should be fascinated by the divine narrative of Scriptures? Does loving an obscure tribe’s grammar, in which time is measured in humane-seeming patterns rather than governed by a tripartate past-present-future, automatically create a worldview that dismisses humanity’s possession and enjoyment of the world? Wouldn’t an appreciation of Motzart do the same thing, then?
More to the point, it seems a central ethos of this blog is that fiction can provide a different “language” that allows for a different source of insights into the world. If that is the case, it seems that the more extreme diversity of languages might allow for more interesting insights. Why is such a search necessarily indicative of an atheistic worldview (other than the fact that many linguists, like many scientists or astronomers or physicians, are atheist)?
I certainly hope I’m not being anti-intellectual, and I’m not confident of the strength of my point in this post, but I’m not arguing against all value in studying obscure languages and cultures or even preserving their mythologies (which is point 3 from the article). I was arguing against a naturalistic concept of studying mankind, that in order to understand ourselves we must understand all of us, “if it is true that human cognitive capacity is the truly distinctive and most remarkable characteristic of the species,” as Chomsky says, and if we loose some of the isolated parts of human culture, we loose knowledge of ourselves.
The goal isn’t interesting voices or observations; it’s understanding ourselves. For some academics, amassing a pile of interesting things no matter their relevance or significance is equal to drawing conclusions. But we aren’t the only source of knowledge for this. I guess I assumed, thinking of Chomsky, that the Amazon of human understanding (divine revelation) has been rejected in favor of endless study of its tributaries.
I definitely don’t want to say that civilization as we know it today is the best organization of the physical and spiritual knowledge we have. I’m sure there are many beautiful points of difference to be found outside, but points of difference or healthy living are not the same as critical fountains of knowledge about ourselves.
About fiction and different voices–there is value in diversity like you say, because difference perspectives will see different things, if that’s not redundant, but we can bring too many such voices into a room, ruining the conversation with cacophony. So we criticize some of them before turning them out to find another pub to annoy.
I guess my objection boils down to one sentence: “If the world is all we have and we are the only ones who can glean anything from it, then I preserving cultures, languages, and everything else makes some sense.”
The implication seems to be that “If the world *isn’t* all we have….then preserving cultures, languages, and everything else makes *no* sense.”
I agree that “human cognitive capacity” is not “the truly distinctive and most remarkable characteristic of the species”–from a Christian perspective, the image of God contains far more than mere processing power, however advanced. But that doesn’t make human cognition, and the languages that embody it in various forms, invalid as a field of study.
I don’t mean to pound away of the subject, but I think your comment crystalized a few things for me.
I don’t mean to imply that there is no value in the language studies. Note that I say, “I want to criticize materialists or naturalists for rejecting divine revelation as a source of real knowledge.” I did not say the only source. I’m criticizing the perspective that moans to lose 85 words for “bee,” which I assume we won’t lose because we know about them, so I guess they point to that as an example of some unknown similarity that will be lost if the descendants of the Incas, say, reject all hints of Incan language/heritage and take up Spanish for everything. As sources of knowledge go, they’re straining.