Early mornings are pretty hectic around here, getting our son off to school is a labor intensive routine, besides changing diapers (on a 16 year old) feeding him a light breakfast (which he usually doesn't eat.) Getting him a cup of coffee (which he pretty much demands) Putting his clothes and leg braces on. And finally waiting for the bus. There is not a lot of time for introspection. But after he is on the bus we usually spend a little time relaxing with coffee and reading the news. And that is where we came across the article about how languages are disappearing. Last week we came across an article that mentioned that the last speaker of the Bo language has died. And the language no longer exists in the world. Today we came across an article mentioning five other spoken languages that are soon to disappear. One, the language of Ter Sami, is spoken only by two people in the world. The world is getting smaller, no doubt about that, news and information travel pretty much instantly around the world. Software programs are translating languages at a whim.
(Although still not perfect by any means, recently one of our manuals which was obviously translated by machine told us "This sign means your duty as compulsion things." which is just ambiguous enough to mean about anything. And could be downright dirty.) But the point we are trying to make is this... the bible informs us that all people spoke the same language until the tower of Babel was built and God destroyed it and cursed people with different languages as punishment. The Internet is slowly (very slowly) allowing average people to communicate in ways that were impossible just a few years ago. And in doing so slowly breaking down language barriers. (It is just possible that one day everyone will be able to speak a single language to communicate across the entire planet.) Hence the title of this article, From the tower of Babel we are now digging the hole of Lebab. Time will tell which languages survive and which don't... and we may never know what cultural ideas will die with those languages. Change is inevitable, but we at the crazy will always wonder what the language of Bo sounded like. It's sad that we will never know. Ciao for now.
(A quick note to point out that mentioning the Bible in this post does not in any way represent a belief in the story of Babel. The earliest known written language is Sumerian Cuneform, and some of the tablets from 2300 BC talk about things that happened 432,000 years before that date. So it's just possible that people have been around for a long long time. We would imagine the list of dead languages is probably longer than the list of living ones. Just a thought.) If anyone is interested in an article about dead languages they can go here. It's wikipedea so you may want to check other sources also.
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