Alert reader sends in:
The English language boasts more vocabulary than any other language in the world and yet, it is the most poorly understood and used one. Of course it needs MORE words since it has been reduced to one or two meanings and completely did away with all the many nuances of every word it inherited from Greek, Latin, French, German and other languages!The English language has been reduced to 1st degree, immediate, materialistic and emotional language befitting… mercantilism and excluding all other meanings including philosophical, spiritual and inherited cultural contexts and realities! (More beneath fold)
As an interpreter, I can testify that finding the exact equivalent in English of the words used by a French speaker from over 40 countries to reflect cultural realities requires a lot more than a word-for-word interpretation and I am convinced you deal with it with Spanish as well: someone from Spain won't speak the same as someone from Porto Rico, Guatemala, Venezuela or Chile English, as it is spoken today, did away with all cultural differences and reality as a precursor to one-size-fits-all computer language. So much so that kids in schools can't even understand read Shakespeare or Chaucer today without a PhD!
Our own founding fathers were taught Latin and Greek… An other thing of the past we need to return to.
Examples:
Amazing… “Risk” didn't exist as a concept in language until… MERCANTILISM! Look up the dates!
Before that… it had nothing to do with danger or peril. riscus – Wiktionary
A “riscus” was a box or a chest. Nothing more.
And “Peril” meant many things other than “danger” and “insecurity”. It meant “action:, “essay”, “attempt”, “experiment” AND it included all the possibilities of failure as a bad result but NEVER as the dissuading starting point prior to any undertaking unless fully insured from head to toe before engaging into action.
It simply implies “calculated” potential, bad outcome. Nothing more. What the meaning of life was always all about: the calculation of success or failure, based on instinct, experience and historical culture and how going about taking action based on all those data (not WHETHER to take action).
As a result, mercantilism reduced action to its extreme materialistic result at the expense of creation of anything other than money. And yet… mercantilism never was the essence of humanity.
People went about their business of building, hunting, fishing and cultivating without ever considering “risk” or “peril” as monetizable. Why? Because they lived life and learned to instinctively calculate risk and accept the outcome. When they died, they died. Period. The community learned from it.
Tiger or bear claws, shark teeth or such allowed trade between agrarian, hunting and fishing populations, some of them nowhere near the sea or a dense forest. They allowed hunters and fishermen to obtain cultivated products from the land while giving agrarian population access to meat and seafood. A means of exchanging which would be acknowledged by all but it didn't work because societies doing the actual work did not agree on the UNIT of value of their work.
Kings ruling over domains encompassing hunters, fisherman and cultivators introduced a more universal money known forever: gold and silver but they were still ONLY exchange currency among traders. What made them more appropriate is that they didn't corrode, they lasted forever and were universally recognized and accepted. That's how domains were allowed to exist and survive.
The Dark-Ages might have been the last enlightened ages we may have lived through… no wonder that period has been vilipended and vilified since “public” education. And yet… the best humans could build was built then.
Imagine if the builders of the cathedrals had considered “risk” and “peril” prior to building them (and they have no name. We don't know who were the architects, contractors, workers were; all we know is that they ALL were paid and they ALL decided to participate in the endeavor, undertaken in God's name). Any outcome, good or bad, was in God's hands. The injured on the job were taken care of by the community and everything we've been taught about “the Dark Ages” is false: there were no veterans on Skid Row and no beggars in cities.
Mercantilism is when money became a tangible commodity, with intrinsic value rather than as an accepted unit of value for work and tradable and exchangeable goods across the board, between all producers, hunters and gatherers. The goods themselves lost their value and so did the work involved. The money became an end to itself on which to… speculate,
We had to wait for the British “industrial revolution” to read about famines, prostitution, slavery and such. Go back to Dark-Ages literature! Doesn't exist.
The first “industrial revolution” might very well have been the beginning of human devolution which would explain that we no longer know how to build cathedrals and stick people in… little boxes called apartments, with no yard and no possibility to grow a few tomatoes…
The computers we use know only first degree language. Either… or. Intentional? You better believe it!
