Our language is not a perfectly whole picture of the world, whatever your language is. So "being an audience to conversations in a language not our own" may be an antidote for that incompleteness

"Potawatomi and most other Indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family."

"Puhpowee, she explained, translates as "the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight." As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed. In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery. You'd think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But in... See more