A bit of encouraging news on two fronts.
- Women poets marking their mark and getting recognition. Best wishes to Ruba, Hisa, Halima and Mastura.
- A real effort - male and female - to preserve and promote a very important language - which is sadly eroding under the attack of global McDonalidization.
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4 comments:
"which is sadly eroding under the attack of global McDonalidization."
Although it is somewhat sad that language extinction has been going on since the dawn of agriculture, we have to look forward into the future where for all intents and purposes physical and communication barriers will be lacking. Arabic is hardly at high risk of disappearing compared to hundreds of others that will inevitably join thousands of extinct and forgotten languages.
People care most about living a life with dignity and respect. If the future of Homo sapiens sapiens is one in which people speak 1, 2, 3, or 5 languages then so be it. Very few are the people who can be confident that their ancestors and forebears all spoke the exact same language they were brought up to speak today.
Thanks yours.
I agree that communications barriers are becoming less and less. That is a good thing. But that doesn't require that there not be different languages, just as having a national language in a country require that everyone have the same opinion. In other words, diversity is good.
Different languages are no barrier to living a life with dignity and respect. And one might argue that self respect involves respect for one's culture.
I remember being in Turkey once and reading an inscription in Arabic script. A Turkish woman nearby looked at me and said "How can you read this? I'm Turkish and I can't". Clearly, sad that she was cut off from her history and culture. It doesn't have to be that way.
People can be bi-lingual - if not verbally at least in reading. Each language has its own nuances which cannot be fully translated into another. There is a richness there that is quite precious. Sad to lose it.
Like forsaking Turkish coffee for Nescafe. A lot can be lost.
"Different languages are no barrier to living a life with dignity and respect."
I meant earlier that living a life of dignity and respect is more of a concern that what language people speak.
As for subtlety and nuances, so what?
As I mentioned earlier, thousands of languages have gone extinct since the dawn of agriculture.
We can expect languages widely spoken to be about 5 in a hundred years.
Mistake:
THAN what language people speak.
Yes it's sad, but that's about it.
I would say managing to be understood within the same language has always been a problem, so good riddance to multiple languages. Maybe it's for the best.
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