October 04th, 2020

When I started my website, I wasn't thinking about a blog. As I discussed what I was doing with others, several suggested that I might want to start a blog as well.

Last night, I was reading, and decided that I definitely need to include a blog. My inspiration was Robin Wall Kimmerer's "Braiding Sweetgrass," specifically her chapter "Learning the Grammar of Animacy," starting on page 48 of the Kindle edition, where she describes the challenges of learning to speak the language of her indigenous ancestral language.

As I read, I experienced a very deep and moving resonance with what she presented as her experiences, as deep and rare and significant to me as the handful of peak spiritual and physical events in my life. Kimmerer notes that communicating in English is a much, much different than in Bodewadmimwin.

English, she points out, is all about things: only about 30 percent of the words in English are verbs, whereas in the Potawatomi language, 70 percent are. I read her description and my response was "YES! This is what I've been struggling to describe and explain now for YEARS!" I was almost in tears reading about verbs "to be a Saturday," and "to be a bay."

I only speak (and write) English (and I am pretty good at it, if I say so myself), but her description is EXACTLY how I have experienced the world since I was a little child.

English is my way of verbally communicating, and agree with her that English is "the beautiful language I was born to," a language that is "the most useful, with the richest vocabulary in the modern world."

But one thing that I've long known is that modern English is not a single language: it is a language that long ago started importing words, grammar, spelling rules, pronunciation, and more from many, many other languages: the Celtic family of languages of ancient Northwestern Europe; Latin as a living language in the first Century CE; Anglo, Saxon and other Germanic languages; Latin again through is descendant tongues Spanish and French; Greek as a dead language of the educated, and then Latin as the same; the Norse Germanic languages; then modern French and German.

And then aspects from South and East Asia and others from around the world as Western Europeans spread their culture and absorbed aspects of other cultures.

English is a very useful, and even beautiful language, but it indeed misses other ways of talking about the world. Kimmerer shows how it is possible to speak both English, and the language of Animism.