ON LANGUAGE AND WAR AND PEACE
Photogra[her: James Neeley
Photographer: James Neeley
ON LANGUAGE AND WAR AND PEACE
Although our website is produced in English, our intention is to eventually have both “Your Dreams Coming True” section and the main website translated into as many world languages as possible.
Language is a beautiful thing, and when it rises to the level of poetry it is a thing of art. Yet there are many nuances, many twists and turns, stylistic embraces and relationships, and references infused with centuries of tradition and meaning in a language. All of these make language forever a mystery. Mysterious at times even to the people to whom a language belongs, language is a greater mystery when it is subjected to the attempts of translation. It is as if the many peoples of the world possess so many treasures, free for the taking, though no one can carry them away. So people from each culture must bear sad witness to the loss of richness when a language is engaged by others. The people from each culture must pine to think, if only they knew what we knew, if only they understood the full implications of this phrase or that story, and the great sagas hidden within.
Every time the United Nations General Assembly meets and a speaker speaks, there is a simultaneous translation to all attending members. The translation, always limited, always imperfect and incomplete, is nonetheless a reaching across cultural divides. It may be that the limitations to translations are a good thing, to remind us that despite the artifices of power and tradition around the world, we are still a world made up of individuals of humble domains, and nations formed from the collective lives of imperfect individuals.
In the evolution of language there have arisen hundreds of formal languages and thousands of dialects, though none are static and all undergo transformation over the decades and centuries. Some have disappeared into antiquity, becoming extinct along with certain tribes. Others have arisen through the mergers of bioregional groups of people. There have been attempts in this last century to invent a universal language for the world, and these have failed in the same way that any single language has failed to take over the world, and not surprisingly. For language itself is one of the greatest if not the greatest of cultural treasures that a people possess. Language above any other difference is what clothes a group of people in the style surrounding a culture. Though the world may evolve as one family, it is a family of diversity and beautiful and wondrous differences, both of groups and individuals, and that diversity serves to enrich the world.
The enigma of evolution, this paradox, the push and pull of a world community evolving together, carrying both the mantle of tradition and the search for common and individual invention, has no set of fixed rules, lest is be the one overriding influence that is dynamic change. New words are invented and in some cases old words fall out of use. Words are sometimes adopted across cultural divides, and along with these changes move all of the unspoken signs and symbols of life. These unspoken symbols have always constituted the greater part of language, for there have always been more ways to live than there are ways to describe living. The way one greets another, the way one works, the way one prepares and serves food and drink, the ways one expresses interest, desire, derision or inquiry in unspoken terms-all of these constitute the greater part of a language and a culture.
In spite of the pitfalls and misunderstandings possible when we assess the chasms that fully divide cultures, there have been languages duly recognized as having the highest universal grasp. These are the languages of music, the languages of art, the languages of mathematics and physics and above all the language of love, which merges cultures and nations and peoples, and to which all other forms of language and tradition bow.
For love’s sake people have endured forced separations, torture, imprisonment, and even death, throughout history. People in love have been willing to abandon a culture and tradition, or to adopt another, they’ve been willing to trek across epic journeys and even defy a nation if required–all for love. Wars have been waged for love, though peace has always and will always encompass the rising and falling of wars, for war ensures that someone’s love is destroyed. Therefore peace, hidden in the quietude of harmony, without bomb’s and rocket’s and killing’s blare, has continued to prove itself stronger than war.
I was born on Biloxi land in North America, and it took a Native American to explain to me that I can properly call myself a Native American, since I am born a native to Turtle Island.
The Biloxi tribe live in exile, scattered across the country, leaving only the name of their tribe as a legacy to their land. Like many small tribes that have been displaced, their language is one endangered with extinction. The Biloxi have a phrase
John Michael O’Keefe