Languages are like jungles, wild and ever growing, untamed and irrepressible. Language is flowering, leafing, wriggling, a flickering light creeping through a thick canopy of leaves. Language springs and bounds from the wild. The land sings it´s song through the words of the farming community, words like trees, sprouting wherever fertile land may lie. Land seems to cross fertilise language and language the land and the roots of words reach deep into the earthy past. New leaves , cocky as new words and vice versa, shine with sheer delight at being green, reaching upwards towards the shining sun.
It is no accident that the Amazon, being one of the most bio-diverse areas on the planet is also one of the most linguistically diverse. The Amazon people of Colombia merge meanings into richly suggestive textures of thought that makes one thing cling to another through metaphor.¨To be shining¨ in the Tukano language is a metaphor for sexual arousal or erection. The Bow wood tree represents maleness, dominance, aggression and procreative activity. Language reveals depth upon depth of untold intimacy between man and nature. The uacu seed , which can refer to sex, smells like a womans sexual organs while the v-shaped seed resembles the shape of the imprint of a womans buttocks in the sand.
Indigenous communities, when having conversation in their own language, invariably, dip into more dominant languages like English or Spanish for terms that they lack in their own language. Such words are usually of measurement, money or time. Words that try to tame the wildness of nature. There are many words in indigenous languages that cannot be translated for example because they refer to a rare plant or because they refer to a specific use of a root or particular local knowledge. When an indigenous language dies, so does a w hole way of knowing.
The roots of the word 'intelligent' are 'inter' and 'legere' , which means both 'read' and 'gather'. People could gather words and meaning from their lands. To gather of course means to collect. Languages are a source of knowledge, gathered of the course of centuries and millenia, intricately entwined in metaphors, words, phrases and stories.
For this reason, for centuries, conquering nations have striven to conquer not only lands and people but also language, killing meaning, religion and knowledge in the process. The Spanish and English drove people out of their lands, taking them away from their meaning, away from their languages roots. When lands are lost, the interplay of land and language suffers a death, metaphor, poetry and allusion disappears. When a people loses its language, it loses its mind. In this way, English and Spanish have, for a long time been dominators of people, tools of destruction and killers of history.
In Ireland, as in the Amazon, North America, Africa and the entire colonised world, we have seen a slow death of language and history. Our forefathers fought and died to keep our roots, our language , our history alive. As a free nation we now have the choice to continue their heroic struggle against a powerful force of oppression, yet now we see Fine Gael, proposing measures that could well kill all progress in the rebirth of the Irish language, that has taken place in the previous 50 years. The grants in the Gaeltacht, the promotion of Gaelscoileanna, the use of Irish on public transport. All of this will be undermined when Fine Gael gain power,as looks inevitable. Our spoken language, more than our built heritage, written history or artistic heritage, more than any physical embodiment of history, holds the key to our past.
Fine Gaels proposal to make Irish a voluntary subject in schools, will essentially put our own language on par with German, French and Spanish in relevance. The importance of our heritage will, essentially, be undermined in one political move. Enda Kenny and co. want to relegate Irish to the level of luxury. What message will it send to Irish teenagers, even to those who choose to study the subject? Parents, equally, looking solely at the practicality of the language will surely advise their offspring to ditch the language in preference of other, more 'useful' subjects. This will not just compromise the status of the language it will change the dialogue that exists between the present and our past. Our history will start to die, as it did during the Penal Laws that tried so hard to kill all that remained of Irishness.
Dont be a Planter, Enda. Dont kill our past.
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