Lewis Thomas on Language
Fromn the Simultaneous Translation site comes this lovely quote from the biologist, Lewis Thomas in his wonderful book, "Lives of a Cell." Language is simply alive, like an organism. We all tell each other this, in fact, when we speak of living languages, and I think we mean something more than an abstract metaphor. We mean alive. Words are the cells of language, moving the great body, on legs. Language grows and evolves, leaving fossils behind. The individual words are like different species of animals. Mutations occur. Words fuse, and then mate. Hybrid words and wild varieties or compound words are the progeny. Some mixed words are dominated by one parent while the other is recessive. The way a word is used this year is its phenotype, but it has deeply immutable meanings, often hidden, which is its genotype.... The separate languages of the Indo-European family were at one time, perhaps five thousand years ago, maybe much longer, a single language. The separation of the speakers by migrations had effects on language comparable to the speciation observed by Darwin on various islands of the Galapagos. Languages became different species, retaining enough resemblance to an original ancestor so that the family resemblance can still be seen.
– Lewis Thomas
Living Language
from The Lives of a Cell: Notes of
a Biology Watcher (1974)
posted by Nancy White at 7:40 PM
2 Comments:
...and as a common language separated into various strands, so did consensus about the nature of reality; space and time mutated; new paths crossed primal wilderness. They say that aboriginal cultures in Australia divided according to lines that are only to be remembered in song -- as a responsibility to be held in trust by individuals in order to sustain a culture perhaps 50 or 100 thousand years old. The gods in Dreamtime separated groups so that all could prosper and not compete for the same resources.
But things come round at last, don't they, and now it's just a little planet and us to deal with the conflicts. As Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead is famous for saying, "Something has to be done by somebody, and it's just pathetic it has to be us."
grin. I'm smiling Dan. Thanks!
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