Monday, September 14, 2015
In Gloria Anzaldua's, "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" she wrote on a subject that matters deeply to her. She believes that attacking one's form of expression is "a violation of the First Amendment". As she may be right, John McWhorter did a better job proving his claim in his piece, "The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English". Before I even began reading these pieces I read the prompt and I already agreed with Gloria's standpoint; a dying language is tragic, it seems like when a language dies a culture and its people go with it. But McWhorter's article left me surprised. There are over "6000 languages in use today", and that number "will likely dwindle to 600", according to McWhorter. I had no idea how many languages were in use all over the world. I bet a new language dies everyday and I never even had a clue. John McWhorter reiterates that "language death, ironically, [is] a symptom of people coming together." That makes perfect sense to me; if everyone spoke the same language think of how easy it would be to communicate with one another, therefore bringing people closer together. Maybe losing a language isn't so bad after all.
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I agree with you in that McWhorter does a better job in explaining his claim. If everybody used only one type of language to communicate amongst one another, people would have a much higher understanding of each other. People would grow closer and thus function as a society more effectively. I was also surprised when McWhorter stated that there were over "6000 languages in use today." I didn't expect that many different languages to be out there. That fact supports McWhorter's evidence because when there are 6000 different languages out there, it's a little more difficult to communicate than when there's only one.
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ReplyDeleteI disagree with your statement "maybe losing a language isn't so bad after all." No matter what McWhorter says in his writing like for example how he states that loosing all other languages isn't so bad. Well I believe he is wrong too, having multiple languages is a good thing it makes us unique. It defines every culture and sub-culture into one. Which personally I believe is pretty amazing, so when you say losing a language isn't so bad, i believe it is. We all need to put our brains to work more because if not our generation will just be stuck in one mentality. When everyone is speaking one language our creativity will decrease and our ability to think will be like secluded to think like the others. We will live in a world where we are expected to have the same ideas as others and to act like others. Having one language will not help us expand our horizon in language or literature and just like Morrison said language will soon die out.
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