Languages And Cultures Quotes

“It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that "legends" depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the "legends" which it conveys by tradition. (For example, that the Greek mythology depends far more on the marvellous aesthetic of its language and so of its nomenclature of persons and places and less on its content than people realize, though of course it depends on both. And vice versa. Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &C. are dead, for deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.). (letter 180)”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

“A language is a freeway to a culture.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Karadeniz Chronicle: The Novel

“How do you know, what you claim to know?”
― David James (The UnMonk), Your Mind at Siege : Exploring the Conundrum of Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence through the Lens of The Diamond Sutra

“Do you want to learn Tagalog?” I asked, surprised. I had had no idea Shla had an interest in foreign languages.

“I just… people try to speak to me in Tagalog, sometimes.”

“Oh,” was all I managed. Outside the church my mum and I had frequented, the only other language people had tried to speak to me was Slow English.

“Yeah, I just… I don’t know. I had to choose a language and it was a reason, and then it seemed useful for the competitions… Like, half the word that doesn’t speak English speaks Spanish. But…”
She swallowed, glancing up. “I don’t want it. It’s not what I want and I… I’m a little angry, because the only reason Tagalog is anything like Spanish in the first place is that Spanish people decided to take over. And then, I don’t know, the English did too, and I’m English, right? But…” She gestured at herself. “I’m not.”

“You are,” I promised her. “And you are not,” I added.

It was equally true and in this, at least, I knew just what she felt. By leaving my country I had damned myself to never being home again, eternally in exile, even if I were to return to Ethiopia I would never just be Ethiopian. Shla had never left, but being adopted had left her with a feeling of loss, like she had lost the thread of her own existence, her own history. In the end, she was standing at the border, unable to declare her loyalty to any one country, or, it seemed, any one language. “But now you can’t drop it, you need to get your GSCEs.”
― Aska J. Naiman, From Far Away To Very Close

“BUNAHAN

When the last speaker of Boro
falls silent,
who will notice


the first-grown feather
of a bird’s wing? (gansuthi)


or feel how far pretending
to love (onsay) is


from loving
for the last time (onsra)?


Quiet and uneasy, in an
unfamiliar place (asusu)


no one sees her, or listens;
there is less of her
than there was.


The last speaker feels
Boro’s world fall apart,


knowledge unravels:
healing plants go
unseen; the bodies of animals


are unreadable.


With a last thought, onguboy
(to love it all, from the heart),


she leaves fragments
of the world she held in place.


We touch their husks,
about to speak and
about not to speak
(bunhan, bunahan);


awash in loss,
incomplete.

Note:
The italicized words are from Boro, an endangered language still spoken in parts of northern India. For more on this story, see Mark Abley’s Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages.”
― Laurelyn Whitt