Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said "Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests."
What I've learned from the past 3 months in lands where English is not the dominate language is that the so called language barrier is a far greater phenomenon than simple linguistics. A barricade of the brain seems to make meaningful dialogue in any language difficult these days, ergo the differences of actual tongues is not so important to me.
A sort of semantic sterility is obvious is English, with its political language having become almost entirely hollow and many of its common expressions being equally meaningless. My experiences with French and Spanish of late have taught me that they have the same problem, even if it less pronounced. They too struggle in the modern social system that turns all things into commodities and all lives into statistics. It almost seems more tragic with them on account of the fact that they are far more organized and aware of the problem, and yet still can't break through to something different.
We are free to say whatever we please, but have yet to find a combination of words that can motivate us out of the postindustrial funk that is killing the environment and making exploitation and its companion, injustice, ever more prevalent. Meanwhile other parts of Humanity, most notably recently, the Arab world, is finding its voice and roaring for the ages. Such things give me hope and make me think that maybe we yet have time to find our way in the darkness.
"There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other--- by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought." -Oscar Wilde
