Of all the great technologies that have defined eras, none have been quite as timeless as language. The first truly “human” creation, it is the thing that separates us as sentient creatures apart from every other animal on the face of this earth. Language is the tool with which we communicate ideas, with which we discuss the abstract and the immaterial. It defines each and every one of us as human and defines humanity as one of, if not the most intelligent of all living beings on earth.
And then, because we’re humans, we made different versions of it.
People on all sides of the planet, of all shades and colors and cultures each developed their own mastery of the tongue. Different people using the same sounds in a different order, or different sounds in the same order; it made no difference. Millions of years later, great civilizations have risen, and they have fallen. Cultures indigenous to forests and to valleys and deserts, religions whose gospel are sung out in sing-song chants and the strumming of vocal cords, wars won and lost by the complexity of codes and the simplicity of a general’s orders, and so many other truly human things, born of man and man alone have come and gone, have been born and have died, and at the root of all of them has been the human tongue.
Language shapes culture, and culture, identity. These clever little clicks and clacks and rolls of the tongue which we assign so much meaning to, this ingenious invention with which we have built the world around us defines us. What we view as dangerous or as safe, as delicious or as disgusting, as good or as evil we define in the context of each of our mother tongues.
So much can be inferred of a people from their language. A tongue with a dozen words for advance and not one for retreat tells you of a nation, strong, proud, and fierce, home to a class of war-aspects in mortal form. A dialect spoken in a sweet and serene sing-song hymn sings of a calm and knowing culture that follows the flow of nature and rides along the river waves. A language with a hundred borrowed words indicates a melting pot; a hodge-podge gumbo stew of other peoples come together under a single land, by devotion or by imperialism, giving themselves, their cultures, and their tongues.
We are creatures built by and defined by our singular greatest invention and every incarnation of it. It is the difference in the tones and inflections of the voice which each separates us, and the underlying concept which each system follows that unites us. It is the rhythmic clicks of the Xhosa people, the bird-like song of the Sylbo, the culmination of half a dozen different tongues that is the English language, that defines each of us as a different people and a different culture, yet it is the complexity of sound which indicates the abstraction of ideas that identifies us each as truly, beautifully human.
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