Raider
@interstellar
Raider
When the Spanish colonizers arrived, their Christianization project began by destroying the very foundation of our indigenous faith. They broke the Anitos. They silenced the chants. They erased every ritual that didn’t serve the cross. What was once sacred became feared. What was once power became persecution.
Colonizers didn’t understand that. In... See more
Colonizers didn’t understand that. In... See more
Babaylan, Bye Bye Lang : The National Colonial Amnesia
…believing in the naturalness of your mother tongue shows a lack of serious engagement with language and belies the entire premise of modern literature. This is why I believe that existing outside of one's mother tongue is not exceptional, but simply an extreme version of the normal state of things.
Yoko Tawada • Exophony
The German polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), brother of the famous explorer Alexander von Humboldt, likewise tried to develop a universalist and philosophical approach to the study of languages. The central fact of language is that speakers can make infinite use of the finite resources provided by their language. Though the capacity for
... See moreBill Mayblin • Introducing Linguistics
"Running one mile has more in common with running a marathon than sitting at home.
Investing $100 has more in common with being a millionaire than being broke.
Writing one sentence has more in common with writing a book than never writing one.
It always feels small in the beginning and the big goals seem far away. It's easy to talk yourself out of the
... See moreIn the Bible’s book of Genesis, monolingual humans aspired to build a "city and tower with its top in the heavens". God punished humans by creating a multitude of languages to sow chaos: "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be... See more
Ruby Justice Thelot • The Balkanization and Babelification of the Internet
6. One of the clearest signs of intelligence is being able to hear an opinion you disagree with and not act emotionally
In a world in which any skill that can't be leveraged for the maximum benefit of capitalism is seen as a dubious enterprise, it can be difficult to make the case for languages that are not widely spoken. Yet their continued existence matters, for a variety of compelling reasons. "First of all, it's just the right thing to do," says Daniel Bögre... See more
Mary Elizabeth Williams • Lily Gladstone's Acceptance Speech Shows Why We Need to Save Endangered Languages
the ways we have systematically undermined knowledge systems falling outside of Western traditions. Epistemicide is the killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a knowledge system.
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"There's some neuroscientific evidence that being multilingual is really, really good for your brain. And it's good for one of them to be your cultural language, because that's good for your self esteem and emotional health."