A few times I’ve come upon the power of a common language in the last few days.
I’ve seen a video about a meeting of Amazonian pajés (shamans) and herbalists sharing and maintaining traditional plant use, facilitated through the common language Portuguese, I’ve read about the success of the Zapatistas where native people are helped in their efforts by the common language Spanish. And just now a post in Anarchism & Social Ecology mixing Spanish and English just as comfortably as my family juggles three languages at home.
Do you know of other examples?
I thought one of the non-evil possible uses of a LLM could be to create a new language like Esperanto, and ideally it would simply be a mix of English and Spanish, to connect a maximum number of people? Or are artificial languages always doomed to fail?
Edit: title, because there is not one language of solarpunk
I really felt like that at first, but also I think that using the language of the oppressor to join native forces and maintain and spread traditional knowledge is pretty cool. There is something positive growing out of the horrors of the past, I hope, some new understanding.
that’s one area you have to be VERY careful with – co-opting the language of the oppressor is one thing, but in most cases, the oppressor’s language was the one used to erase indigenous languages (cultural genocide) – this was so prevalent across the US and Canada, that many indigenous American societies have to turn to ethnographic records compiled by those same colonizers in an effort to rebuild or recreate their native languages