More on languages

I loved all the comments yesterday about God's remarkable vocabulary and the remarkableness of Godwriting™. If you haven't read the comments yet, you have a treat in store for you.

Language is a non-ending topic of fascination for me. It certainly is a miracle that we move our lips, synchronized with our tongues, vocal chords, mind and it is another miracle that other people also speak and understand these sounds. How did we ever learn to do this? How much we want to speak. It must be a basic need. How much we want to communicate.

I suspect that with language, as with Godwriting,  there are underlying sounds from God, from nature, from which all languages arise. It must be that language starts in the same place, and then, like flowers, languages bloom in infinite varieties.

And, as time goes on, new idioms arise in every language, and some of the old expressions fall off, and some words in a language come to have different meanings from what they used to. Language is not a stationary thing, not at all, unless it becomes a language that people no longer speak. And how does that happen? What happened that Latin became a dead language?

I remember that, at the time I was teaching school, there were only three or four living persons who spoke the Hopi language. In that case, all the speakers but three or four had died. I am so sad.

So far as I know, the only dead language that ever came back to life, is Hebrew. Hebrew was chosen over Yiddish as the language of Israel. The idea must have been that Hebrew had a great heritage and would be respected. But how is it that Hebrew had died in the first place?

I also remember from my school-teaching days that there are, of course, families of languages. There are languages that seem to be all by themselves. None of the scholars knew where certain languages came from. The examples I remember are Basque and Japanese.

I read recently that in Cameroon, a country in Africa, the people speak 250 dialects!

In regard to the idea that all languages started from one level of sound,  I'm sure I told you that one time Effendi from the Sufi House spoke to me in Turkish, and, to both our amazement, I understood what Effendi had said. We exchanged a few sentences before we were aware of what was happening.

My sudden realization that Effendi was talking to me in Turkish and I was understanding Turkish broke my understanding. I couldn't even remember what I had understood a few moments before.  You have to know that Effendi wasn't saying, "Here, have a piece of cake," something that anyone would understand. He was saying something pertinent to my life.

But at the same time, apparently, he wasn't saying it for me to understand, for when I asked him what he had said, he wouldn't tell me. It wasn't for me to know. I sure do want to know what he had said. I think it was something wonderful, and I think I will never know -- how would he remember now?

There are so many things I will never know!