maandag 4 maart 2013

2013/08 Desperanto


2013/08 Desperanto

Is this a law, or just a loophole in some other law? "What is true is true," my old dad used to say, and you could not deny that, of course. The one liners from the past tend to be sharper than the digital variants. The
proverbs from the past spoke to the essence of things, an essence that still exists. They get around the general gist, but the point is usually sharp and clear... in many situations. The virtual internet variants of what we now call "one liners" are more fugitive, somewhat poetic, and therefore slightly surrealistic.

If you cannot sleep, you are awake in someone else's dream.

Language is like the wind, it comes and goes. It is like the air between us, the biggest tool we have, phenomenal in all its facets.
In the EU, there are 21 official languages, and 210 official translators.
That is not so many when you compare it to the number of languages in the
world. How many do you think you could recognize?
Meanwhile, the language is overshadowed with jargon. Not only at the EU, but also on the internet, in scientific forums, in sociology, in politics, on twitter... Everywhere, new words arise that might serve a temporary purpose, but in the long run, contribute to a cleavage of meaning and constipation of the brain's learning capacity. Financial terms smack you in the face. "Derivatives" is a strange enough word, but when derivatives are securitized, we are talking about a synthetic transaction that is pretty close to "abracadabra." This is especially true in the Dutch language, where we combine words to make new words without any hesitation; like "Damschreeuwer" – something like "Dam shouter" – for someone who shouts loudly in a city square (i.e., the famous Dam Square in Amsterdam) during the national remembrance day and causes general panic, then ends up getting thrown in jail for over a year.
Anyway, we have lived for centuries on a continent where people speaking many languages live close together, mix endlessly, and through nationalism, are regularly structured, restructured, and defined. Keep in mind that we live in a world of propaganda and image, besides an explosion of information.

Words become loaded, a public response, an image. In the U.S., "liberal" is
almost a four-letter word, while liberalism is at the root of the
individualism that is so integrated into American society. Maybe they hate
themselves? The universal language is not Esperanto, despite the noble
efforts of so many: it is more "Desperanto" that has become the world's
language. Solidarity, teamwork, doing something together, sociability –
luckily, it is still like that in language, almost everywhere and despite
everything.






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