musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

The feast of languages


I’ve never been very good at foreign languages -perhaps that’s why I am so fascinated that some people can speak more than one with seeming ease. Some languages, I can recognize by the sound alone, although I don’t understand what is being said, for others I can make out a few words, although seldom the context. Still, the sheer number of languages amazes me, and I continue to be impressed that there are people who are fluent in more than just English.

When I was much younger, I wondered at the spelling and grammatical mistakes I saw in many homemade signs that hung in shop windows advertising their wares; I wondered why the owners would choose to disclose their poor command of a language which I assumed that everybody had been taught in school. It was my father who pointed out that the writers of the signs might be recent arrivals in our country and likely grew up speaking and writing another language altogether; he was impressed that the writers had mastered as much grammar as they had -the English language, and especially its grammar and spelling was difficult to master if you hadn’t spoken it all your life. I had never considered that before; those signs were among my first lessons in humility.

There’s something that has always seemed magical to me about language: that similar sounds can have such different meanings; that the contexts in which they can be embedded can alter their messages depending upon where they occur; and that there are a great number of languages with strange and intriguing names which are dying because their speakers are as well. The thought occurred to me that if their speakers had experienced different realities than the rest of us, not only might they have created unique words to describe them, but we may never have a chance to understand, or even know that these other realities even existed.

Of course, not only might those realities be unfamiliar to us and their details unverifiable, but their preservation is surely precious -if only to investigate why they were deemed worthy of preservation. Societies differ, as do its members, but what we hold in common, can help us to understand and cooperate with them. It’s one of the reasons I have difficulty with colonization -with forcing foreign ways of thinking on other cultures. Proselytization is particularly unfortunate: it is an attempt, however disguised, to override the unique, lived experience of someone else, because they are different from us.

In this era of widely available internet communication, holding on to one’s uniquely experienced culture may be difficult enough, let alone preserving the quirks of a similarly isolated language. And in these existentially worrisome times of impending climatic disasters, and rapidly mutating viral emergence, one might wonder if it’s even worth worrying about a disappearing language or the culture that speaks it. Surely there are more compelling priorities…

Still, does our language influence the way we think about things -or about the things we even consider for thought in the first place? There is a fair amount of debate in this area, to be sure, but suppose for a moment that we didn’t even have a word for a concept. How likely would it be that we’d be able to form an opinion about it? Or even realize that there was an unnamed-something about which we were expected to have an opinion?

Should we consider the reasons for wanting to preserve a dying language, as merely sentimental? And if we were to dedicate funds to preserve it because of its link to the history it may reveal or the culture it represents, is that a sufficiently compelling reason to pursue it? How does that compare with the use of those scarce resources for things like relieving hunger, or the resettlement of fleeing migrants? Would not Utilitarian considerations dictate that we utilize what we have where it is likely to do the most good?

If a child were encouraged to learn another language, would it not make more sense to teach her a language she might someday be able to use, rather than one that, in all likelihood, she probably wouldn’t? It’s hard to argue strenuously for the latter, except to say that the joy of learning any language apart from the one used at home or school may interest her in other cultures.[i]

Of course, learning another of the already commonly spoken languages for use in regions where many of its inhabitants already have that ability may not be as useful as it might seem at first. Different, though, would be the ability to speak a local minority language -especially if it is one that is associated with the community: culture and history live in a language.[ii] I am reminded of the disaster of the Church-run residential schools here in Canada that aimed ‘to take the Indian out of the child’. The children were not only separated from the customs and culture in which they had been raised, but absolutely forbidden to speak or communicate in their native languages -languages that embodied their unique heritages.

Languages die, not so much because the ideas they express or the idioms they use are no longer understood; they usually die because their speakers die, and whatever wisdom they may have gleaned from their journeys through life is compelled to dwell in shadows we do not deign to probe.

My grandmother, in her one hundred years of existence, still remembered words and expressions she had learned from the country where she was born. Although the words were incomprehensible to a child like I was when she was alive, they still became trusted rebuttals to arguments I had in the playground -largely, perhaps, because my friends assumed I possessed the key to their meanings, and hence to the power of their magic.

While I fully admit that this did not in any way amount to my trying to save her expressions from extinction -indeed, for all I know, they are still used in the village where she was born- it was more an attempt to resurrect some of the unusual ideas they seemed to describe. In fact, I’d like to think those strange-sounding thoughts still rustle quietly in the memories of the children who heard them. They certainly do in mine…

[i] https://aeon.co/essays/should-endangered-languages-be-preserved-and-at-what-cost

[ii] Ibid.

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gozzter

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