The power of Babel

At the neighborhood bar where I hang out on weekends to be available to those who wish to practice their englisCHe, I often run into foreign students who come to improve their Chinese and imbibe the “cocktail” ambience. I engage them in conversation hoping to convince them to reciprocate to their counterparts by enticing them to practice their English, too.

I met a couple of Jamaicans. One grew up in Nigeria. His father was from Cameroon. They were happy to meet someone who knew where the Blue Mountains were, and conversant of the difference between Yoruba and Hausa.

Last week, I recognized an Indo-Aryan from the Indus Valley, so I asked where he was from. Sure enough, his Mom is Indian and his Dad, Pakistani. “But I had only been to India once, never to Pakistan,” he claimed. “I was born in Nigeria near Abuja and grew up in Zimbabwe’s Harare,” he added. I went beyond my hourlong normal stay in the bar conversing with the dude about South Asians scattered around the world by the British Empire! 

All the foreigners were multilingual. John McWhorter wrote The Power of Babel on languages, which I have yet to read (a copy sits in SF for me), but I do have a copy of David Crystal’s Encyclopedia of Language, 3rd Edition. I keep an eye on language as a cross-culture tool.

McWhorter claims there are more than 6,000 living languages spoken across the planet, and Crystal lists 1,000 of them (of those spoken by more than 100,000). I am not versed enough on the main thrust of linguistics to line up one side or the other on MIT Noam Chomsky’s notion that “we possess a neural mechanism calibrated to produce basic sentences” but the Fula language of Africa recognizes 16 genders and a tongue in Australia has only three verbs, so languages do not develop out toward rational evolutionary lines. It is, nevertheless, comforting to know that 95 percent of the world speaks one of the top 20 of the 6,000-some planetary gab.

Our concern is a bit more mundane. Or, more poetic if we recall Juliet saying to Romeo from Shakespeare’s pen: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” That oft-quoted line is now contradicted by research that shows humans do have a preference on letters and phonemes, preferring that which is closest to their name, or, as in the case of the Sino cultures, that which sounds like something desirable like “happiness” and “long life.

The biblical tower of Babel (babel, Hebrew verb “to confuse”) downsized humanity’s arrogance in building itself a stairway to heaven. Providence saw it wise to confuse unilingual humanity into a multi-linguistic cacophony. McWhorter turns the classic condemnation of Babel as a symbol of human pride into a celebration of humanity’s life force. Worldwide language developed in many directions. McWhorter uses Creoles as markers. (Louisiana’s creole, to me, subjugated French out of its flower-scented Frenchy-ness in its cultural imperialism over its colony!) 

France suggests that instead of calling ISIL the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, we could use the Arabic al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham in its loose acronym, Daesh! Acronyms are rare in the Arabic world with the exception of Palestine’s Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawamah al-‘iSlamiyya), but ­Da’esh is commonly used by anti-IS forces loyal to Syria’s al-Assad to counter rebels and eliminate reference to the words Islamic and State, inculcate defiance and disrespect through the negative undertones of Arabic words (daes, one who crushes something underfoot, or, dahes, one who sows discord).

We know what happens to dreaded names in the long run. They get domesticated and appropriated so that “Niggah” on the Westside of Chicago is now an address of endearment rather than the pejorative it was originally coined to be. Da’esh I am sure will find the same fate, in the same way as the f-word and sh*t are now tamed for home consumption.

Still, words cut deeper than bullets, and there might be wisdom in staying at the level of rhetorical confrontations rather than revving up those tanks straight from Moscow to Crimea via Kiev, a practice Ukraine was familiar with in the days of Khrushchev, now recklessly bandied about by Vladimir when he feels folksy!

It was a long way from the tower of Babylon to the power of Babel and though we might have finally learned our lesson on the strength of powwow, it may have come too late. We are now told that the isotopes out of Fukushima reactor deliberately made isodopes out of all of us. The radioactivity is more toxic than reported, dude, so be prepared to radically evolve!

Mr. Obama was one out of three who voted against the Iraq War in the U.S. Congress, but is now gung-ho to wipe out the IS not only in Iraq but also in Syria without al-Assad’s permission. At least, that’s true at the talk level. So, let’s just keep talking a bit longer. That way, the “power” of Babel does not get confused with the “powder.” Cute, neh?