fajrdrako | Fannish night... (Reply)

deakat came over, and we watched Stephen Fry's Planet Word, episode 2, "Identity", about how language shapes identity. Languages discussed included Irish, French, Basque, Occitan, North African French, Hebrew, Yiddish. and the various accents and dialects of England. One African language was featured; no Asian ones. I wondered what the criterion was for choice and decided it was simply Stephen Fry's whim and interests.

We noticed that when the Basque restauranteur was talking (to be translated by his daughter), he kept switching between Spanish, French, and Basque. We could identify the Basque because it was the bits we didn't understand.

Part of the show talked about linguistic genocide, a term that tends to confuse me. Cultural destruction loss is a terrible thing, yes. But things change all the time. How can languages be stopped from dying? Populations disperse, cultures change, and we are always driven by political, social and economic forces. You can't stop a language from dying. A thousand years ago no one spoke English because the language didn't exist, though many words still in use were around. In another thousands years we'll have a new set of languages. I'm sure the Etruscans wanted to keep their language and culture alive; and the Harappans; and an unknown number of languages born and lost before the dawn of history. The value of langauge is complex; ephemeral; tied to identity, but also to practical and utilitarian uses. Where does a dialect end and a language begin?

I find all these questions fascinating.

So then we talked about languages we know, and languages we want to know better, and artificial languages (like Elvish and Dothraki).

random actually speaks more languages than I do, and better - though possibly his Russian and my Italian are analogues, somewhat forgotten but we think we could relearn them if necessary. We both like to dabble in languages, but he has real skill in speaking - while I dabble more like a watchmaker might poke at different kinds of clocks to see how they tick. I don't don't really have linguistic skills - just a fascination for languages.

We played the game of asking, "If you could learn one more language, what would it be?" Something that isn't Indo-European would be interesting, but what? Basque, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Finnish? Cree or Algonkian? The possibilities feel endless... but of course they aren't: limited to something like 7,000.

Oh, to have the skills and fluency of Francis Crawford.

Which I don't, and never could have, but the next best things is having friends who are willing to talk about languages with me.