{Truth in Cultures [continued (9)]}[29th October 1988]

[Redbook6:31-32][19881029:1905e]{Truth in Cultures [continued (9)]}[29th October 1988]

19881029.1905

[continued]

What people seem to forget [is] that a language is a means of communication; and that, like nations and governments, languages exist to serve the Individual.* Of course, when you lose a living language, you lose something: you lose whatever you lose in translation of the significant works written in that language.** But that doesn’t stop us reading the Bible in English – or Welsh.

To the argument that the local culture depends on the language, I would say that so far as ‘culture’ means non-linguistic arts, they need not be affected; and so far as it means behaviour, they [sic] will change whether the language survives or not. The World is changing.

Cultural diversity, within a framework of universal communicability, is an essential pool from which to draw new cultural ideas and developments. But local cultural and political separatism constitute a form of apartheid: almost always, racial apartheid. By cutting your group off from others, you exclude them*** from your own territory, race, friendship, kinship and Love; and that is apartheid.

*↑As I have said! [[Redbook6:28-29][19881029:1905b]{Truth in Cultures [continued (6)]}[29th October 1988]]

**You lose something in interpretation in your own language, too. And the writer lost something in the writing of it.

***[the others, presumably]

[continues]

[PostedBlogger19for20062019]