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Universal Language for the Human Race. | Humanity is too varied

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Forum: Artificial languages
Topic: Universal Language for the Human Race.
Poster: Alexander C. Thomson
Post title: Humanity is too varied

Years ago, if I ever thought about the Dutch, I assumed they were rather like the Germans in speech, habit and other matters. At that stage of my thinking, I'd probably have happily gone along with the idea that the Dutch and Germans could once again share a common language as they did a millennium and a half ago.

Then I started learning Dutch and became obsessed with what set it apart from German (which I’d learned previously). Suddenly, a set of concrete, absolute notions formed in my head that the German Mind and the Dutch Mind were actually poles apart and had developed their divergent idioms to reflect that.

Then I arrived in the Netherlands and started going down to see my fiancée at weekends in Zeeland. I was pretty proud of myself for falteringly mastering Zeêuws and flaunted it at the metropolitan Dutch: look, here are people who are spiritually and culturally and in other ways so different from you that their language is quite distinct and expresses sentiments that haven’t crossed your minds, nor do they have much use for some of the distinctions and nuances you lot make.

Then I spent rather longer down in Zeeland and realised that each island was its own thought-world and that the dialects that had sounded (not just phonologically, but idiomatically) so identical to me as a newcomer were so far apart that they were characteristic of different ways of life, too. (Reading up on their history, in parallel, confirmed this impression.)

I’m now at the stage of considering myself an honorary son of my now wife’s home town and when we’re back visiting there, I chuckle with her at the odd expressions and out-of-place concepts of folk a few miles down the dike in one of the other towns on the same island. I’m starting to pick out family idiolects, too: between my in-laws and other townsfolk, and even between individual branches of the in-laws.

And yet folk with no particular familiarity with the (non-English) Germanic languages are sometimes found blithely assuming that the Dutch, Germans and even Danes and Norwegians are linguistically (and in other ways) pretty similar — a misapprehension typically based on having heard jetsetting representatives of each of those nations speaking a similar kind of (British TV idiom-informed) learner’s English with good fluency in strictly-bound contexts. Such notions of commonality do not survive contact with the subjects’ wonderfully varied home environments, brought out to the full if you hear them speaking their own dialect of Flemish/Dutch/German/Danish/Norwegian on a visit to their folks. And just look at the worlds-apart diversity of scenery in this corner of north-western Europe alone, and ponder what kind of lives their forefathers led in those differing districts, to realise why their spiritual, cultural, historical and all other distinctive human concepts come in many shades.

No, there will be no reversal of the confusion of Babel. Mankind is far too determined by his immediate climatic, terrain, cultural, historical and social circumstances to be able to think in universal idioms worldwide. Montesquieu was an Enlightenment giant and progressive but saw and explained this limitation quite categorically. The artificial languages are wonderful, Esperanto being the finest of them, but there will never be a world people with its heritage encapsulated in a single language whose words are loaded with shared experiences and common frames of reference.

[Edited at 2012-12-10 21:08 GMT]

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