language(1/2)
The Birth of Language
and adam rose fearful in the garden without words for the grass his fingers plucked without a tongue to name the taste shimmering in his mouth did they draw blood the blades did it become his early lunge toward language did his astonishment surround him did he shudder did he whisper eve (discovered on The Red Hand Files - Issue #179)
How happy I was to know the word
Every time I rounded a corner, I’d encounter a sublime new gorge or escarpment. In the haze, the horizons of distant peaks braided together. The nature writer Robert MacFarlane observes, in his book “Landmarks,” that a Scottish painter once described this phenomenon to him as landskein. “Skein” can mean either a coil of yarn or a flock of birds in a V formation. Landskein, a neologism, uses both ,knitting the V’s of mountaintops together.…
Language is integral to culture
Language holds the keys to culture. Much of a culture’s distinctiveness exists in its language. The ways individuals and groups are represented happens through language. “My Computer” is a natural icon on the desktop of a member of an individualistic culture, but it’s a faux pas to a collectivist. An Eskimo lives in constantly snowy atmospheres and has dozens of ways to differentiate types of snow in their language, while a Pacific Islander has one word for snow but several for tides and currents (Livermore, pg.…