Finding the right language

Part of the reason I started this gemlog was to try to find a way to talk about the complex and often overwhelming possibilities, connections, and phenomena found in the many lifeworlds and knowledge traditions of the world, living in a society that doesn't seem to have any interest in these things.

I've mentioned Tyson Yunkaporta's book, "Sandtalk", in previous notes, and no doubt it will come up again in future. It's no exaggeration to say he has opened up worlds to me that I didn't know were available to me. There are different paths we can take to understanding the world in new ways, but something that I increasingly have seen as important is opening ourselves to different languages to talk about the world. One of the most infuriating thing about liberal parliamentary democracy is the tendency to reduce the range of words and their possible meanings to the smallest amount possible, even or especially when those meanings aren't the most widely understood.

Dingoes, for example, are never called "Dingoes" by government Ministers or bureacrats. A recent article in The Guardian outlines the way officials have changed the language used in relation to dingoes to reduce the chance of any resistance to their simplistic "control" measures. Dingoes are now "wild dogs", which people feel more comfortable about being killed on sight. I had to examine my own reactions to this difference in language and realised they were right. "Culling dingoes" sounds like a barbaric slaughter of native fauna. "Controlling wild dogs" sounds like unfortunate but necessary feral pest control.

TypeTogether is a (digital) font foundry, and one of their cofounders, Veronika Burian, has published a really interesting article called "Understanding diacritics". Burian explains something that I, a mono-lingual English speaker, hadn't realised - for all its benefits, Unicode makes some unhelpful assumptions about diacritics and often renders them in difficult-to-read or ambiguous forms as a result. I admit I hadn't really thought much about how diacritics are handled by Unicode until I was reading the "The Rust Programming Language" and came to section 8.2 - "Storing UTF-8 encoded text with Strings" - and then I found myself astounded that we can communicate with computers at all.

Vice magazine makes a bold claim with the title of "Learning a new language can help us escape climate catastrophe". It's click bait of course, but the actual article is actually quite interesting. The point is that Indigenous languages - whether Ngarigu, Navajo, or Gaelic - allow humans to talk about and think about the world around us in ways that aren't possible with other languages, especially the "young" language of Standard English. The hope from this piece is that if we can talk about things differently, maybe we can find different solutions. I think personally we might produce fewer problems in the first place, but either way linguistic diversity seems like a good thing. There's a lot in their about cultural imperialism generally. I'm not a fan of the Vice empire, but this is a pretty great article.

Suzanne Simard also has been thinking about how language shapes thought. She's a renowned scientist, published in Nature and all those things. But (or perhaps "therefore"...) she has deliberately decided to lean more on the language of the Indigenous people of the forests she studies and publishes on, than the barren scientific language in which she has been trained. Academic Science insists on isolating things, and studying them in smaller and smaller detail. It tries to take the humans out of the picture, so that human relationships and connections don't "contaminate" the "truth". Simard, however, is interested in how forests and everything in them - including humans - relate to each other. There's a link to this great interview in text and audio, below.

=> 'Dingoes were here first' | Understanding diacritics | Storing UTF-8 encoded text with Strings | => Learning a new language can help us escape climate catastrophe | Finding the Mother Tree