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the languages of solarpunk (slrpnk.net)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by schmorpel@slrpnk.net to c/solarpunk@slrpnk.net

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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

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[–] schmorpel@slrpnk.net 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] cerement@slrpnk.net 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] schmorpel@slrpnk.net 1 points 11 months ago

I'm aware of that. I'm not trying to say that having been oppressed had advantages for indigenous people, maybe rather that using the language of the oppressor to preserve knowledge means making the best out of a bad situation, and opens the knowledge for the world, which is an important and valuable contribution to common human knowledge.

At same time I immensely appreciate the diversity of thoughts that can arise out of a diversity of languages. By no means do I think we should impose a world language and make all other languages disappear. More of everybody being bilingual or multilingual by default, and an artificial language being one language used to communicate among larger groups of people, like English is now, but involving a larger group of people (and yeah, not being colonialiser-based would be great, maybe a completely new language would truly be better).

Being able to share a common language gives people power - we can share and relate to experiences from people all over the world, we can organize as human species.