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<div class="MsoNormal"><b>The power of Babel</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><b> </b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">At the neighborhood bar where I hang out on weekends to be
available to those who wish to practice their <i>englisCHe</i>, I often ran into foreign students who come to improve
their Chinese and imbibe on the "cocktail" ambience. I engage them in conversation hoping to
convince them to reciprocate to their counterparts by enticing them to practice
their English, too.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">I met a couple of Jamaicans. One grew up in Nigeria. His father was from Cameroon. They were happy
to meet someone who knew where the Blue Mountains were, and conversant of the difference
between Yoruba and Hausa.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">Last week, I recognized an Indo-Aryan from the Indus Valley,
so I asked where he was from. Sure
enough, his Mom is Indian and his Dad, Pakistani. "But I had only been to India once,
never to Pakistan,' he claimed. "I
was born in Nigeria near Abuja and grew up in Zimbabwe's Harare," he added.
I went beyond my hour-long normal stay
in the bar conversing with the dude about South Asians scattered around the world
by the British Empire! </div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">All were the foreigners were multilingual. John McWhorter wrote <i>The Power of Babel </i>on languages, which I have yet to read (a copy sits
in SF for me), but I do have a copy of David Crystal's <i>Encyclopedia of Language, 3rd Edition. </i> I keep an eye on language as a cross-culture
tool.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">McWhorter claims there are more than 6,000 living languages
spoken across the planet, and Crystal lists 1,000 of them (of those spoken by
more than 100,000). I am not versed
enough on the main thrust of linguistics to line up one side or the other on
MIT Noam Chomsky’s notion that "we possess a neural mechanism calibrated
to produce basic sentences" but the Fula language of Africa recognizes 16
genders and a tongue in Australia has only 3 verbs, so languages do not develop
out towards rational evolutionary lines.
It is, nevertheless, comforting to know that 95 percent of the world
speak one of the top-20 of the 6,000-some planetary gab.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">Our concern is a bit more mundane. Or, more poetic if we recall Juliet saying to
Romeo from Shakespeare's pen: <span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:">"What's
in a name? That which we call <i>a rose by any other name</i> would
smell as sweet." That oft-quoted
line is now contradicted by</span> research that shows humans do have a
preference on letters and phonemes, preferring that which is closest to their
name, or, as in the case of the Sino cultures, that which sounds like something
desirable like "happiness" and "long life. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">The Biblical tower of Babel <i>(babel</i>, Hebrew verb "to confuse") downsized humanity's
arrogance in building itself a stairway to heaven. Providence saw it wise to confuse unilingual
humanity into a multi-linguistic cacophony.
McWhorter turns the classic condemnation of <i>Babel </i>as a symbol of human pride into a celebration of humanity's
life force. Worldwide language developed
in many directions. McWhorter uses
Creoles as markers. (Louisiana's creole,
to me, subjugated French out of its flower-scented Frenchy-ness in its cultural
imperialism over its colony!) </div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">France suggests that instead of calling ISIL the <i>Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, </i>we
could use the Arabic <i>al-Dawla al-Islamiya
al-Iraq al-Sham </i>in its loose acronym, <i>Daesh! </i> Acronyms
are rare in the Arabic world with the exception of Palestine's Hamas <i>(Harakat al-Muqawamah al-'iSlamiyya)</i>,
but <i>Da'esh </i>is commonly used by
anti-IS forces loyal to Syria's al-Assad to counter rebels and eliminate reference
to the words <i>Islamic </i>and <i>State,</i> inculcate defiance and disrespect
through the negative undertones of Arabic words <i>(daes, </i>one who crushes something underfoot, or, <i>dahes, </i>one who sows discord).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">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 endearment
rather than the pejorative it was originally coined to be. <i>Da'esh </i>I
am sure will find the same fate, in the same way as the f-word and <i>sh*t </i>are now tamed for home consumption.
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">Still, words cut deeper than bullets, and there might be
wisdom in staying at the level of rhetorical confrontations rather than revving
up those tanks straight from Moscow to Crimea via Kiev, a practice Ukraine was
familiar with in the days of Khrushchev, now recklessly bandied about by
Vladimir when he feels folksy! </div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">It was a long way from the tower of Babylon to the power of
Babel and though we might have finally learned our lesson on the strength of powwow,
it may have come too late. We are now
told that the isotopes out of Fukushima reactor deliberately made isodopes out
of all of us. The radioactivity is more
toxic than reported, dude, so be prepared to radically evolve! </div>
<div class="MsoNormal"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">Mr. Obama was one out of three who voted against the Iraq
War in the US Congress, but is now gung-ho to wipe out the IS not only in Iraq
but also in Syria without al-Assad's permission. At least, that's true at the talk level. So, let's just keep talking a bit
longer. That way, the "power"
of Babel does not get confused with the "powder". Cute, neh?</div>
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