Nothing says cultural diversity, as does language. Last
count shows the world’s 7.5 billion people speak 6909 languages. The vast
majority of China’s 1.3 billion speak Mandarin. Spanish and English are the
next most popular. There’s nothing remarkable about speakers of these languages
unless one locates a Chinese-speaking population in Tierra del Fuego or a
Spanish-speaking settlement in Greenland.
Students in public schools in my old hometown speak barely
more than 100 languages. Are more languages required for diversity in the
city’s public schools? Does it matter? Me, I’m pretty satisfied with Lao Tzu’s
Chinese, Gabriel
García Márquez’s Spanish, and Bob Dylan’s English.
Would
my life be enriched reading a text written in one of the 832 languages spoken
in Papua-New Guinea? Maybe yes, maybe no. It would have no doubt enriched
Margaret Mead’s or the research of someone of her ilk and trickled down to
mainstream society where it might become relevant.
Where
foreign languages strut their stuff is when they provide a word that doesn’t
exist in another language, such as the German gemütlichkeit, which has no direct translation to English. Inuit
terms for snow and ice (Smilla’s Sense of
Snow comes to mind) fill another vacuum in English.
George
Orwell’s Newspeak, used rectify to describe the deliberate “correction”
of the past. His word isn’t commonly used in that context, which is not to say
that correcting the past hasn’t become a cottage industry among what used to be
the nation’s “progressives,” something they picked up from the Russians, those
sly commies able to disappear places as well as people. Not to be outdone,
Trump stole his campaign slogan—Make America Great—from Il Duce, after
translating it from Italian.
In
today’s zeitgeist of revisionism, the Monument Removal Brigade defaced the
equestrian statue of the “white supremacist” Theodore Roosevelt at the American
Museum of Natural History, in Manhattan. Apparently the Brigade was unable to
get a hold of enough dynamite to blow up Mount Rushmore.
Closer
to home (my home), Minneapolis has determined that Lake Calhoun, named for John
C. Calhoun, who sent the Army to survey the area around Fort Snelling, in 1817,
is no longer deserving of such an honor. It has renamed the lake Bde Maka Ska, which rolls off
the tongue like a cube of granite. Perhaps place names don’t bother Native
Americans, but how about when a place name becomes something more—Manhattan Project, for instance.
Over dere in NoDak, where fans of the Fighting Sioux toss
dead gophers on the ice when playing Minnesota in hockey, they’ve had their own
issues. Sioux is derived from the
Ojibwe word that means “little snakes.” I understand why the Lakota take
offense, but it isn’t the offensive word, it’s the offense of using a
Native-American mascot. Evidently they’ve been shocked, shocked that an
athletic team would want to associate itself with losers like Sitting Bull and
Geronimo. Funny, but when searching for a new name, 7th Cavalry wasn’t one of them. It didn’t even make the
shortlist when Fighting Hawks was selected.
Which brings me to Notre Dame and the Fighting Irish. Isn’t
it odd that racism doesn’t cross the color line?
