[Oe List ...] Jaime for the 29th in ST

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The power of Babel
 
At the neighborhood bar where I hang out on weekends to beavailable to those who wish to practice their englisCHe, I often ran into foreign students who come to improvetheir Chinese and imbibe on the "cocktail" ambience.  I engage them in conversation hoping toconvince them to reciprocate to their counterparts by enticing them to practicetheir English, too.
 
I met a couple of Jamaicans.  One grew up in Nigeria.  His father was from Cameroon. They were happyto meet someone who knew where the Blue Mountains were, and conversant of the differencebetween Yoruba and Hausa.
 
Last week, I recognized an Indo-Aryan from the Indus Valley,so I asked where he was from.  Sureenough, his Mom is Indian and his Dad, Pakistani.  "But I had only been to India once,never to Pakistan,' he claimed.  "Iwas born in Nigeria near Abuja and grew up in Zimbabwe's Harare," he added. I went beyond my hour-long normal stayin the bar conversing with the dude about South Asians scattered around the worldby the British Empire!  
 
All were the foreigners were multilingual.  John McWhorter wrote The Power of Babel on languages, which I have yet to read (a copy sitsin SF for me), but I do have a copy of David Crystal's Encyclopedia of Language, 3rd Edition.  I keep an eye on language as a cross-culturetool.
 
McWhorter claims there are more than 6,000 living languagesspoken across the planet, and Crystal lists 1,000 of them (of those spoken bymore than 100,000).  I am not versedenough on the main thrust of linguistics to line up one side or the other onMIT Noam Chomsky’s notion that "we possess a neural mechanism calibratedto produce basic sentences" but the Fula language of Africa recognizes 16genders and a tongue in Australia has only 3 verbs, so languages do not developout towards rational evolutionary lines. It is, nevertheless, comforting to know that 95 percent of the worldspeak one of the top-20 of the 6,000-some planetary gab.
 
Our concern is a bit more mundane.  Or, more poetic if we recall Juliet saying toRomeo from Shakespeare's pen: "What'sin a name? That which we call a rose by any other name wouldsmell as sweet."  That oft-quotedline is now contradicted by research that shows humans do have apreference on letters and phonemes, preferring that which is closest to theirname, or, as in the case of the Sino cultures, that which sounds like somethingdesirable like "happiness" and "long life. 
 
The Biblical tower of Babel (babel, Hebrew verb "to confuse") downsized humanity'sarrogance in building itself a stairway to heaven.  Providence saw it wise to confuse unilingualhumanity into a multi-linguistic cacophony. McWhorter turns the classic condemnation of Babel as a symbol of human pride into a celebration of humanity'slife force.  Worldwide language developedin many directions.  McWhorter usesCreoles as markers.  (Louisiana's creole,to me, subjugated French out of its flower-scented Frenchy-ness in its culturalimperialism over its colony!)  
 
France suggests that instead of calling ISIL the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, wecould use the Arabic al-Dawla al-Islamiyaal-Iraq al-Sham in its loose acronym, Daesh!   Acronymsare rare in the Arabic world with the exception of Palestine's Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawamah al-'iSlamiyya),but ­Da'esh is commonly used byanti-IS forces loyal to Syria's al-Assad to counter rebels and eliminate referenceto the words Islamic and State, inculcate defiance and disrespectthrough the negative undertones of Arabic words (daes, one who crushes something underfoot, or, dahes, one who sows discord).
 
We know what happens to dreaded names in the long run.  They get domesticated and appropriated so that"Niggah" on the Westside of Chicago is now an address of endearmentrather than the pejorative it was originally coined to be.  Da'esh Iam sure will find the same fate, in the same way as the f-word and sh*t are now tamed for home consumption.
 
Still, words cut deeper than bullets, and there might bewisdom in staying at the level of rhetorical confrontations rather than revvingup those tanks straight from Moscow to Crimea via Kiev, a practice Ukraine wasfamiliar with in the days of Khrushchev, now recklessly bandied about byVladimir when he feels folksy! 
 
It was a long way from the tower of Babylon to the power ofBabel and though we might have finally learned our lesson on the strength of powwow,it may have come too late.  We are nowtold that the isotopes out of Fukushima reactor deliberately made isodopes outof all of us.  The radioactivity is moretoxic than reported, dude, so be prepared to radically evolve! 
 
Mr. Obama was one out of three who voted against the IraqWar in the US Congress, but is now gung-ho to wipe out the IS not only in Iraqbut also in Syria without al-Assad's permission.  At least, that's true at the talk level.  So, let's just keep talking a bitlonger.   That way, the "power"of Babel does not get confused with the "powder".  Cute, neh?


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