JUNE 29, 2022 – (Cont.) “Gradually, we developed more intelligible sounds until we had a full set of words, syntax, and grammar. Eventually, as early humans migrated out of Africa and populated all land masses—except Antarctica—people put different spins on words until wholly separate languages developed. Ancient Greek was among them, and that influenced the language of Latium in what later became Rome and its language, Latin. Latin, in turn, and the Greek, affected English, the language you downloaded from my friend Matt and the one in which we’re now communicating. The influence included the word politics—to bring us full circle back to the topic at hand.”
“You mean, all humans don’t have a common language?”
“Well, as a matter of speaking—no pun intended; do you know what a pun is? No—I’m sorry, don’t answer that; we’ll get sidetracked. Laughter is a universal language, and as I told you in the context of our ‘best stuff,’ the performing arts are another universal language. And, you’ll be happy to know, we have math, the universal language of physics, which governs all of humanity, whether we acknowledge it or not.
“I’m glad to know you acknowledge it.”
I felt pleasure in realizing that I understood a bit of the alien’s native language. I returned quickly to the matter of verbal language.
“Many earth years ago—1887 CE by our count—a guy named Dr. Zamenof, who was an ophthalmologist based in Warsaw, Poland, devised a whole new language called Esperanto, based on Indo-European languages, but with a set of simple rules around the use of prefixes and suffixes that allowed a person to leverage a relatively limited number of base words into an entire language. The idea was to create a universal language. About 100,000 people in the world today speak Esperanto, but out of 7.8 billion, that’s a long way from universal.
“English is the closest thing we have to a universal language. It’s certain understood by a larger percentage of people today than was the case when I first traveled abroad in 1979 CE.”
I stopped to take a much needed gulp of lemonade. How had I gotten so sidetracked talking about language? Or perhaps I need to turn the question around and ask, Why had I chosen to talk about politics—specifically, democracy in America—when understanding human language is so much more fundamental, even, than politics? Just then, the alien saved me.
“I’m sorry,” it said. “You were talking initially about politics, and I distracted you.”
“Yes, well, er, yeah. Let’s get back to the topic of politics. Where was I?”
“Something about your guy Aristotle?”
“Right. Aristotle was a great figure of Western Civilization; a philosopher who certainly put his mark on how we in the West—that is much of Europe and North America, plus New Zealand and Australia, which are as far east as you can go from here—have viewed our our place in the world. But Aristotle was only one of the many Ancient Greeks who contributed to how later generations of Westerns conceived politics, governance, and democracy.
“In fact, the very term democracy is derived from Greek—δῆμος or ‘demos’ for ‘full citizen’ and κράτος or ‘kratos’ for ‘power.’
“After some brilliant experimentation with democracy in the city-states of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome took the experiment down new, powerful paths, but ultimately, autocracy in the form of a series of dictatorial emperors, pretty much ended the prospects for a mature democracy. The concept of self-rule had burned brightly for a while, then flickered, then got snuffed out altogether, as the Dark Ages descended over the land.” (Cont.)
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
