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.

Europe needs its own Confucianism

Article published in China Today magazine on April 19, 2013. Heavily edited/modified by editorial. Chinese terms were dropped, substituted by Western terms, etc. Anyways...

Pattberg meets Chomsky at Harvard Kennedy School, April 2010

Meet Noam Chomsky, the master of public intellectualism, who is also the founder of modern linguistics. Here at Harvard Kennedy School, April 2010:

Pattberg with Chomsky at Harvard Kennedy School

The Frontiers of Language Imperialism

Thorsten Pattberg: What is Language Imperialism and How Cultures should compete for their Terminologies; Interview on Corbett Report by James Corbett.

TOKYO/BEIJING - In this exclusive interview we will talk about: Shengren, Wenming, Junzi, Daxue, Emperors, Deutungshoheit, and many more foreign concepts and terminology, and how translation of a foreign culture is the destruction of that culture.

I argue that academic imperialism is wide-spread and that the majority of Western scholars deliberately employ Western biblical and philosophical terminologies for original Eastern concepts, thus making the latter unrecognizable, distorting those countries' socio-cultural originality: China, in Western history books, becomes a China without Chinese and so on.

I have written extensively and consistently about this topic, for example in Asia Times, Global Research, China Daily, German Times, Korea Herald, and Japan Times.

James Corbett in Japan

James Corbett is an investigative journalist, activist, and the host and producer of the Corbett Report based in Japan.