From my bookshelves: “The Last Word”, by Earl Shorris, essay published in Harper’s Magazine and reprinted in The Best American Essays 2001, ed. Kathleen Norris ( Houghton-Mifflin Company, New York: 2001).
Earl Shorris has written fourteen books of fiction and non-fiction. In this essay he speaks about language – how it lives, how it dies, how there are efforts to preserve at least some of those that are in danger of dying out.
English, he says, “dominates the world,” being the lingua franca of science, the Internet, popular culture. But “cultures change,” he says, “and languages survive by metamorphosis and the aesthetics of their creators.” Some dying languages can and should be brought back, if only to save the rich meanings that exist only in that language.
He ends the essay thus:
It is not merely a writer’s conceit to think that the human world is made of words and to remember that no two words in all the world’s languages are alike. Of all the arts and sciences made by man, none equals a language, for only a language in its living entirety can describe a unique and irreplaceable world. I saw this once, in the forest of southern Mexico, when a butterfly settled beside me. The color of it was a blue unlike any I had ever seen, hue and intensity beyond naming, a test for the possibilities of metaphor…
There are nine different words in Maya for the color blue…but just three Spanish translations, leaving six butterflies that can be seen only by the Maya, proving beyond doubt that when a language dies six butterflies disappear from the consciousness of the earth.
Image here.
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