Step Nine

Reading A Concise Introduction to World Religions and some discussion thread comments from my Science Fiction class has made me really seriously think about language some more. The religion textbook tells me that Judaism doesn't really approve of translating its scripture out of Hebrew, and that Islam pretty much says you aren't reading the Qur'an if it's not in Arabic, and I'm sure if I flipped through, I'd find that the original language of sacred texts is important to some extent across the board. An interesting aside to this is traditionally that in both Judaism and Islam, religion is not a part of your daily life, but your daily life is a part of your religion, meaning that your language is incredibly important to your culture.

To me, this makes perfect sense. Why else would SF authors create new languages that usually fail completely because they don't sound exotic, just silly? Why else would Tolkien have created full grammars and dictionaries for at least two languages and probably more for his fictional Middle Earth? As any avid reading of SF and Fantasy can tell you, language is one of the main things that sets cultures apart. 

And as anyone remotely familiar with Overused Shakespeare Quotes can tell you, "That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet". I prefer to agree less with a 14-year-old lovestruck girl and more with Hubert H. Humphrey, who said that "In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be."

So, putting these ideas together: language is inherently tied into the very deepest parts of who we are as individuals and who we are as societies and, perhaps more importantly, how we relate to other individuals and other societies. 

It's because of this linkage that we can use the knowledge of a language to tell us things about the societ(y/ies) that use(s/d) it - especially with reference to religion. And here I feel like CEL dropped the ball. They do devote a nice, tidy page to Language and Religion, but really all they do is give examples of

a) religions that tie writing/language as a whole to a divinity or divinities

and

b) types of religious writing/language.

I want to know how the structure of Sanskrit can tell me about the devotional practices of Brahmins in 14th century BCE India. I want to know how learning the different words for "prayer" can help me understand the different approaches to the practice in different cultures. I want to know, I think most relevantly for this discussion, how the learning the languages of the Silk Road(s) would have helped a traveller to understand the cultures with which s/he was interacting. I want to know how language helped spread religions around, and spread animosity towards religions around. 

Step Nine is thus very clearly Tie the languages you learn to the cultures you meet. Because language is not a static thing, and language can obviously tell us so much about religions and cultures and societies, maybe, I think, even more so than archaeological records.