Monday, December 16, 2013

Protecting cultural diversity, originality, and multitude of all human thought

Pattberg: What is The Global Language Movement?
Pattberg commented on TED Talk: Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanity

When linguistics talk about the “death of languages,” they usually don't mean that as a metaphor. Words die - or better: they are murdered - every day. Read any Western China report these days and you will find that the piece is literally Chinese-free. Translation is to language what genocide is to people. Remarkably, language is the only field of the sciences where no revolution has taken place. Yes, we have more nice explanations and theories, all fine. But we are still destroying foreign words as if there was no tomorrow. The only way forward to a Global Language, as I see it, is to limit translation of foreign key terminologies and instead adopting them into our lexicons. This way, we would include all the world’s cultures’ socio-cultural originality into one and thereby value the cultural diversity, originality, and multitude of all human thought. Just saying.

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