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

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.

Pattberg - German “China-Man” –Diplomacy.edu

 

“It is often said that language is the key to understanding China's culture and tradition. The question is, which one should it be.” --Pattberg

Kind endorsement by Diplomacy.edu: “The current entry: 002 - Thorsten PATTBERG: The End of Translation  is a brilliant indictment of Western silent intellectual arrogance.

The West maintains Deutungshoheit – “having the sovereignty over the definition of thought”. Any non-Western thought may be “translated” into Western categories and accommodated into Western conceptual molds. So Chinese “thought” is just a translation of our own, hence never original. We are not even aware of it." [READ AT DIPLOMACY.EDU]