Actually, fuck the myth of the Tower of Babel. The real beautiful utopia where we can all finally truly understand each other doesn't lie in sameness or uniformity, it lies in the giant and digital Rosetta Stone we are going to build and broadcast across the entire world
So, genuinely no hard feelings, I get where y'all are coming from, but that was actually kind of my entire point
The Rosetta Stone was and is real.
This is indisputable. You can go see the Rosetta Stone on display right now!! I'd say you could even it touch it, but there's museum glass in the way, so that the oils on human skin can't further degrade this 2,000-year-old stele, which is one of the most important surviving historical texts in the world.
The Tower of Babel is not real, and it never was.
The Tower of Babel is a millennia-old religious story about a mythological tower, which serves as a mythological explanation for the origin of different human languages. Yes, there are some religious historians who speculate that the myth was inspired by one or another physical tower, but no, that doesn't prove anything other than "this is how many people in this culture/time and place explained or understood that sort of event."
The Rosetta Stone, on the other hand, is an object of translation that actually exists
Photo credit: By © Hans Hillewaert, CC BY-SA 4.0, retrieved from Wikipedia article "Rosetta Stone." https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3153928
That picture is of a real object. It is not of a picture of a 3,000+ year old myth.
Our attempts to understand each other will not result in us being struck down by some force from on high!
And the true path to a world where we can all understand each other does not involve us all speaking the same language. That's racist bs
True understanding depends on ethical translation and language preservation, not on unity of language
And this is a very urgent thing for us to remember, because a fluent speaker - and especially a fluent native speaker - of an endangered language is one of the rarest, most concentrated, and most fragile sources of knowledge in the world
Preserving and revitalizing endangered languages is a race against time. For many languages, especially Indigenous languages and languages from an oral tradition, the loss of each individual fluent speaker is a permanent loss of language
Almost half of the world's 7,000 languages are endangered! You can learn more about, and find resources and education on, the Endangered Language Project and similar organizations, especially ones that are Indigenous and respect knowledge sovereignty and traditional ownership
knowledge sovereignty: when it comes to language and traditional knowledge, knowledge sovereignty is the simple but super important principle that the speakers of a language and members of a culture should have full, independent control of their own traditional knowledge and knowledge systems. For Indigenous languages in particular, sometimes knowledge sovereignty means certain language resources are closed to those outside the tribe, Nation, and/or culture - which is absolutely fair, given what white people have historically done and are still doing when it comes to stealing, and then fucking copyrighting, Indigenous traditional knowledge. (Related: Fuck Monsanto)
But good news - you can learn more about, support, and access community resources on language preservation at The Endangered Language Project here:
