On language
I love languages. I speak several, having been blessed with growing up in a multi-cultural family, as well as lived in a number of countries. Moreover, I used to work in language education, in addition to proof-reading, translating, editing. Languages, I find, are fabulously rich tools to understand culture. Languages have to be rich, since they have developed over thousands of years to explain all the experiences all the members of a community have lived through, everything they needed to convey, to teach, to share, to remember. There are families of words, of languages, of histories. Some languages have been nearly static for a long time, their isolated peoples unchanging as well. Others, have developed flexibility in order to accommodate invasions, empires, new cultures that intertwine into a new, greater community. Then, there are the languages used as mementos, whose social anchors have disappeared, e.g. Latin, or artificial creations for specific groups, like Esperanto, Klin...