Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Stoning Women to Death and the Realities of Languages

Apaches have detailed names and lists for animals and plants and any one land’s topography. Eskimo speech contains several different words for snow’s surface. European languages have two second person pronouns whereas English has one. It is amazing how the language of a group or a nation reflects its culture, especially the part of it that concerns family relationships.

Aborigines who are said to have social control through kinship have a long complex vocabulary for kinship terms. It was surprising to me to learn that in some Middle Eastern languages the uncles, aunts, and grandparents were given different names according to their kinship as for being on the mother’s side or on the father’s side.

This may mean that the language reflects the structuring of reality pertinent to the group one comes from. This may also mean that linguistic patterns limit sensory perceptions and thinking.

The question is: Can we really judge another nation’s realities objectively, if we do not completely understand or know their language well?

This line of thought came to me because of the stoning death of a Kurdish girl who fell in love with a man her family did not approve.

Now that we are all up in arms over this and the other side takes the defensive approach, how do we close the gap where human rights are concerned? How do we stop the unnecessary bloodshed and unhappiness successfully, without stepping into other people’s bounds?

I am thinking maybe language has something to do with it. Maybe those languages need new words and new concepts introduced to them.

Take the computer, for example. Every nation understands our basic computer terms, even if they have substituted their versions of those terms. Since computers and most computer terminology can be said to be more tangible--compared to social mores, rites and rituals--this might have been easier.

I wonder if we can do that same revolution with the intangibles, those concepts that we could demonstrate and also those we could learn from others. I wonder if we can apply what we did with the computer and internet terms to the solution of human rights problems.

Just a thought.