First, I do not exist. The concept of a 13,700,000,000 year old being, capable of creating the entire Universe and its billions of galaxies, monitoring simultaneously the thoughts and actions of the 7 billion human beings on this planet is ludicrous. Grow a brain.

Second, if I did, I would have left you a book a little more consistent, timeless and independently verifiable than the collection of Iron Age Middle Eastern mythology you call the Bible. Hell, I bet you cannot tell me one thing about any of its authors, their credibility or their possible ulterior motives, yet you cite them for the most extraordinary of claims.

Thirdly, when I sent my “son” (whatever that means, given that I am god and do not mate) to Earth, he would have visited the Chinese, Japanese, Europeans, Russians, sub-Saharan Africans, Australian Aboriginals, Mongolians, Polynesians, Micronesians, Indonesians and native Americans, not just a few Jews. He would also have exhibited a knowledge of something outside of the Iron Age Middle East.

Fourthly, I would not spend my time hiding, refusing to give any tangible evidence of my existence, and then punish those who are smart enough to draw the natural conclusion that I do not exist by burning them forever. That would make no sense to me, given that I am the one who withheld evidence of my existence in the first place.

Fifth, I would not care who you do or how you “do it”. I really wouldn’t. This would be of no interest to me, given that I can create Universes. Oh, the egos.

Sixth, I would have smited all evangelicals and fundamentalists long before this. You people drive me nuts. You are so small minded and yet you speak with such false authority. Many of you still believe in the talking snake nonsense from Genesis. I would kill all of you for that alone and burn you for an afternoon (burning forever is way too barbaric for me to even contemplate).

Seventh, the whole idea of members of one species on one planet surviving their own physical deaths to “be with me” is utter, mind-numbing nonsense. Grow up. You will die. Get over it. I did. Hell, at least you had a life. I never even existed in the first place.

Eighth, I do not read your minds, or “hear your prayers” as you euphemistically call it. There are 7 billion of you. Even if only 10% prayed once a day, that is 700,000,000 prayers. This works out at 8,000 prayers a second – every second of every day. Meanwhile I have to process the 100,000 of you who die every day between heaven and hell. Dwell on the sheer absurdity of that for a moment.

Finally, the only reason you even consider believing in me is because of where you were born. Had you been born in India, you would likely believe in the Hindu gods, if born in Tibet, you would be a Buddhist. Every culture that has ever existed has had its own god(s) and they always seem to favor that particular culture, its hopes, dreams and prejudices. What, do you think we all exist? If not, why only yours?

Look, let’s be honest with ourselves. There is no god. Believing in me was fine when you thought the World was young, flat and simple. Now we know how enormous, old and complex the Universe is.

Move on – get over me. I did.

God

(I didn’t write this; I found on the web, but I wholeheartedly agree.)

In today’s highly globalized world, languages get mixed and evolve at a much faster pace than ever before. English, for instance, is no longer only divided into British, American, Canadian and Australian English; we could say that there is a variety or dialect of English for any other natural language: Spanglish, Chinglish and so on. When French was the de-facto lingua franca of diplomacy (and, by extension, Western Europe), it was not substantially modified by other local languages; yet when English replaced it, after World War I and especially after World War II, it started changing immediately.

English, in particular its American variety, was not only originally used for international diplomacy; rather, as the United States rose a superpower in many fields (technology, business, etc.), one could argue that its language became widespread from the bottom. The average Joe in most other Western countries was exposed to American words: they wore blue jeans, they put coins into juke-boxes, they went to a bar. English words became commonplace over time, and this ultimately led to the creation of what could be easily considered a series of creoles that are, for the most part, mutually intelligible.

(A simple example: Italian immigrants in the US who returned to Italy brought the word sciuscià back with them. It is now seldom used anymore, but it was a common term in Southern Italy after WW2. As many may have guessed, it was the Italianized version of the English word shoe-shiner, whose direct Italian translation would actually be lustrascarpe.)

This “linguistic pollution,” while being very interesting on its own, makes it extremely difficult to analyze the nature of the relationship between language and thought. Language isolates, however, come to the rescue.

A language isolate is a language which shows no direct “genetic” correlation with any other language. The most widely known isolate is probably Basque (Euskera), spoken in an area between Spain and France. This is what the article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“All human beings are born free…”) looks like in Basque:

Gizon-emakume guztiak aske jaiotzen dira, duintasun eta eskubide berberak dituztela; eta ezaguera eta kontzientzia dutenez gero, elkarren artean senide legez jokatu beharra dute.

While this is unintelligible to most (if not all) non-speakers, we can immediately notice that at least one word is recognizable: kontzientzia. This proves that Basque has been somewhat polluted by surrounding Romance languages, and renders it useless for the research in question.

Thankfully, there are some language isolates that are spoken in areas that are also geographically isolate. The most striking example is the Pirahã language, spoken by less than 400 people along the Maici River, in Brazil. It is among the most amazing languages that we know about.

Widely studied by Professor Daniel Everett, Pirahã shows very peculiar characteristics, the most striking of which are the following:

• A single word meaning both “mother” and “father”
• No numerals, except for words that roughly mean “small quantity” and “large quantity”
• No terms for colors, except for words that roughly mean “dark” and “bright”
• Only three pronouns (I, you, they) that need to be combined to yield the others (I + you = we)
• A very limited clause system that effectively prevents embedding sub-clauses

The lack of specific numerals has been actually tested by Everett in an experiment. The question is: do Pirahã speakers “understand” numbers even without having words for them? They certainly understand the concept of quantities. It has been written — I’m afraid I can’t locate the source right now, so please take this with a grain of salt — that any attempts to teach them actual numeral words failed, because while they understood the underlying concept, they were simply unable to use them, as they were not used to them. In a way, it is not unlike most people’s reaction to Esperanto’s future participle: we sort of get the grammatical idea, but we just don’t know what to do with it.

When I was in Egham, UK, for a summer English course, one of the teachers we had told us one thing that stuck with me: language is a habit. You can say you speak another language, he argued, only when you stop thinking in your native language and translate your thoughts; you can say you have mastered a language only when you think and speak directly in that language. The implications of this simple gem are enormous: in order to be proficient in a language, we have to absorb not just its rules, but its way of thought. If we were to learn Pirahã, then, we would have to rewire our brain in order to get rid of the distinct concepts of numerals, colors and so on that we have been using all our life. If we didn’t, we would just be translating all the time. This is clearly no easy task, but proves that language is indeed a habit.

Another very interesting language, albeit not strictly a language isolate, is the Aymara language, spoken by little more than two million people among Chile, Perú and Bolivia. While most other languages refer to the future as being “in front of us” and the past as being “behind us,” speakers of Aymara refer to the future as being “behind them,” and the past as being “in front of them.” It sounds out of place to us, but only until we put our prejudice aside and stop to think about it.

While we say that “times goes fast,” we still imply that we are the ones moving through time; we simply cannot, quite literally, take a break from it. We are forced to go through time, and we conceive this as physically moving through it. For this reason, we can claim that the future is ahead of us because we are going there, and that the future is behind us because we have already been there; in fact, we are coming from the past and going towards the future. It makes sense.

The Aymara people, however, use a different paradigm. They stand still, and time travels “through” them. They are facing the past because they know what has already happened, simply because, well, it has already happened. On the other hand, nobody knows what the future yields, therefore it is as if it were behind our back. We can only see in front of us, and we can only fully see the past. It makes sense as well, but if you find yourself having a hard time fully accepting this point of view, worry not: it’s quite common. At least you can understand how the Pirahã feel about dealing with concepts they never felt a need for.

Language indeed defines culture, and this is also why Esperanto can be difficult to handle at times: not having a pool of natural speakers, save for the relatively few “native” children of Esperanto-speaking couples, and therefore not having a unique backing culture, at times it simply feels too arbitrary. Moreover, most Esperantists have a strong aversion to the naturalization of foreign words, preferring etymological translations in order to preserve the language’s origins; failure to do so is referred to as krokodili. As an example, e-mail is called e-mail in most languages (even in French, which is notoriously picky about foreign words: they use logiciels on their ordinateurs rather than software on their computers!) Yet, the correct word for e-mail in Esperanto is not *emajlo or something similar, but rather retpoŝto: ret[a] (network), poŝto (mail.) How this helps new Esperanto speakers, especially in today’s world, is beyond me, but I suppose that this is a topic for another post.

A final note: many of you may have heard that the “Eskimo language” has an incredible number of words for snow. The idea behind this is that, since they are surrounded by snow, they talk about it a lot. While it’s a fascinating claim, it’s also completely false. Moreover, there is no such thing as an “Eskimo language” (just like there is no “Indian language” or “Chinese language”), and the word “Eskimo” is actually considered derogatory. However, this urban legend is yet another proof that language defines culture, or at least feeds prejudices — in this case quite innocent ones, thankfully — about different cultures.

I have already said that language is the foundation of human culture. It is, however, more than that. Language is one of the very few “inner traits” that define the different ethnic groups, that is traits not immediately visually discernible when seeing someone new. Everybody can tell if somebody has a similar ethnic background: Caucasian people look different than African people, or Asian people. Yet, while is it true that a Swedish will probably look different than an Italian, it will be virtually impossible to discern a Spanish and a Portuguese just by looking at them.

Groups defined by a common language

In such cases, and especially when populations mix due to varying borders over the course of history, language effectively define the identity of populations. Not surprising, many stereotypes are based on making fun of how a foreign language sounds and how immigrants speak the local language: in Italy, Asians are often mocked by replacing /r/ with /l/, an obvious reference to the Japanese liquid consonant. More often than not, this is done in good spirit, as is the inevitable attempt to have foreigners pronounce words that contain sounds that they are not familiar with. When in the UK, my group caused immense frustration in the activity leader who tried to pronounce “biglietto.” This is all usually done in good spirit today, yet in war times a similar technique has been used as a way to detect potential spies.

Sometimes, even in the modern day, a language is used as a common trait by a group and used to differentiate given group by others. Such is the case of Catalunya, which succeeded in having a top-level domain, .cat, to be made available for websites in Catalan. While this is not uncommon nowadays, with “content-based” top-level domains such as .museum and .aero, it is the first time that a language has been awarded one.

Another case for political unrest that is mostly visible through language is the current state of affairs in Belgium. The country is divided in two main parts: French-speaking Walloon and Dutch-speaking Flanders. The country has been struggling to have a strong government since 2007, and while there are deeper cultural and economic differences between the two areas, language is by all means the most prominent and immediate one.

In Northern Italy, homophobic, xenophobic and wannabe-secessionist political group Lega Nord insists that local dialects be taught in schools and used as official languages in public offices, also to mark a clear distinction between the North and the South of the country, and possibly to make it harder for immigrants to integrate, as they would have to pass a dialect test before being granted the permission to dwell in a given town.

It is interesting to note that immigrants from the same area of the world often tend to form clusters. Prime examples of these are the numerous “Chinatowns” and “Little Italy” neighborhoods. This happens not only to get the immediate support that derives from kinship; it is also a way to retain the group’s original culture. How long this lasts is debatable; it is a fact immigrants today are able to keep up with their origins more than immigrants could do just a few decades ago. To this day, respect for foreign cultures is more widespread, as is the ability to stay in touch with the motherland. Back in the day, it was not uncommon for second-generation immigrants to only have a basic knowledge of the family’s native language, even though the accent that came from their first-generation immigrant parents stayed for several more generations, and in some cases it became a distinguishing trait of the specific local group (see for instance the Brooklyn accent.) This kind of accent usually has a much stronger connotation of pride for its speakers compared to “standard” ones such as the Boston dialect.

In other cases, a social class might lay claim on its speech, slang and accent as a way to differentiate itself from the upper, “snob” classes; see for instance the Cockney speech.

Groups within a language

Group identity can, however, also be claimed within a language. Black people, for instance, have been historically referred to by white people using words that had a strong negative connotation, the most common of which is negro. While the origin of the word is not offensive by itself (it simply means “black” in Spanish), it started carrying a negative meaning by the way it was used. Moreover, as the word found its way to different languages and dialects, variations of it appeared; what is interesting is that today the more phonetic transcription nigger or nigga is considered somewhat more offensive than negro.

In any case, modern usage has led to unusual workarounds to be politically correct. Most non-blacks might use the phrase African-American, which of course only applies to black people born in the Americas. In the United Kingdom such phrase would make no sense, and consequently the word black is used without worry, in part because black slavery, or slavery of any groups for that matter, was not as widespread in the UK. (The situation in India, however, was quite different: the possessions of the East India Company was notably exempted from the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.) The race for political correctness in North America about the words used to refer to black people has been exploited for humorous purposes by many comedians, usually replacing black with African-American in unrelated phrases such as “black Friday.”

A very interesting aspect of ethnic and social groups targeted by offensive words is that, over the course of times, members of such groups take on the usage of the same words to refer to one another, in a linguistic phenomenon called reappropriation. This does not mean that the words is decontextualized and cleared for usage by anyone; on the contrary, those who do not belong to the group are discouraged even more from using it. In addition to the original offensive connotation, the now-reappropriated word carries the additional implication that the outsider is mocking both the group and the group’s usage of the word itself. Words that have been reappropriated include most racial and sexual slurs, but can also include words such as nerd or geek. In some cases, some words achieve enough “grammar strength” to be declined: for instance, the word guido (originally used to refer to working-class Italian immigrants in the NY area, from the first name Guido that was probably common at the time) has given birth to the female version guidette.

It is worth noting that members of one group are sometimes allowed to use reappropriated words belonging to other groups or even joking about them, without necessarily sparking harsh reactions from members of the “target” groups. This is clearly visible in Russell Peters’ stand-up comedy. Being the son of first-generation Indian immigrants in Canada, he defines himself as being brown and jokes about how different ethnic groups and their languages are perceived by one another, playing with and effectively demolishing common stereotypes. It is very likely that the same lines would cause controversy if they were uttered by a white man (especially those about Arabs), proving that linguistic reappropriation, and ultimately language, can change the way we relate to one another.

Culture could not exist without language, and not only because we wouldn’t be able to share it with one another. Animals, lacking full languages, are only able to communicate simple pieces of information: there is food over there; a predator is approaching; I am ready to mate. Contrary to popular belief, they do not chit-chat with one another; they are simply relaying basic information. A cat might indicate to one of its kind that it is happy, but will not seek a full conversation with its fellow. They lack the body parts to do so, and are therefore unable to conceive any higher form of communication. This is not unlinke people who are blind from birth: not having ever seen colors, they simply don’t know what color is. It’s an entirely abstract concept to them, much like every human fails to grasp the concept of a fourth dimension. (I strongly recommend reading Edwin A. Abbott’s “Flatland” to get a better idea of the problem.)

Without language, we wouldn’t have any literature, or math, or philosophy, or religions, or politics, or engineering. If we weren’t able to fully communicate and share our thoughts with others, we would be forever stuck in an environment without being able to improve it. Chimpanzees are the most intelligent animals. They are very similar to us, and do have remarkable communication skills compared to most animals, and they are able to use tools. Yet they are not able to do more than what they do. They have no push for innovation. For instance, there are no reports of wild chimpanzees ever attempting to build anything that wasn’t directly targeted at obtaining food. If a chimpanzee had a “human-like” idea, it wouldn’t be able to share it with its fellows, and for all intents and purposes, it would be as if it had not had it. Moreover, we wouldn’t even know, because non-verbal communication has strict limits. Sign language works in humans because we have the innate ability to communicate extensively, and it could be said that muteness is a statistical error: the instinct to communicate is still there. On the other hand, chimpanzees who were taught the sign language were only able to express comparatively simple thoughts.

It would therefore be naïve to limit the idea of language to spoken word, or to a set of grammar rules, or even to a writing system. Language, in itself, is a much broader concept: it’s a foundation upon which we build everything. We are humans not because we have opposable thumbs, or because we walk while standing up. Our very humanity exists because we are able to think about abstract concepts, and we can do that because we have the potential for language.