“We are blessed with language, a system of communication that is so powerful and so precise, that we can share what we've learned with such precision, that it can accumulate in the collective memory. And that means, it can outlast the individuals who learned that information, and it can accumulate from generation to generation, and that’s why as a species we are so creative and so powerful, and that’s why we have a history.” (12:45) --David Christian Nicely put by Mr. Christian. That said, we, as species, would be even more creative and more powerful and we would have an even more complex history if we also shared the information accumulated by the world's other language speakers. READ MORE: The Coming of Post-Translational Society
Pattberg commented on TED Talk: Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanityWhen 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.
