Youth Wave

Zubair Idris

(God) Most Gracious!
It is He Who has taught the Qur’an.
He has created man.
He has taught him speech.

(Surah Ar-Rahman, Ayat 1-4)

You hear it in a bustling school classroom, a busy marketplace teeming with shoppers, a crowded football match, a political rally – people screaming, screeching, shouting, all trying to express themselves over the din and commotion of everyday life. It is true for all over the world, except that the language spoken is actually quite different.
It is difficult to give an exact figure of the number of languages that exist in the world, because it is not always easy to define what a language is. The difference between a language and a dialect is not always clear-cut. However, it is usually estimated that the number of languages in the world varies between 3,000 and 8,000. Some we are familiar with like English and Bangla and Arabic. Others we will find difficult to even pronounce like Fulfulde, Madurese and Chichewa. Yet 12 million people speak Fulfulde in regions of Niger and Nigeria, 13 million people speak Madurese in Indonesia, and 9 million people speak Chichewa in Malawi and Zambia.
While there still remains an incredible diversity of language in current times, there are a lot of languages that have become extinct over the ages. They have fallen into disuse and people no longer speak them or learn them except perhaps for academic purposes. Some of these extinct languages are lost to us forever, and we are unable to decipher their meaning if we come across them inked on an ancient piece of parchment, or perhaps carved on a derelict cave wall. Others we still know the grammar and usage of, but nobody bothers to speak them. And there are still others, which you will find out if you read on, that have a strange way of returning from the dead.
And then there are alien languages. These are languages meticulously made up by science fiction and fantasy writers and usually have a cult following of fans who congregate in awkward social groups in an attempt to hone their talent at speaking it.
The Rosetta Stone and the Egyptian hieroglyphs
I live a five minute walk away from the British Museum. The museum is home to the fabled Rosetta Stone – the key that allowed the young French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion to finally unlock the mysteries of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Hieroglyphs are symbols that can represent a word or a sound; and the same symbol can serve different purposes in different contexts. Hieroglyphs were a formal script, used on stone monuments and in tombs, that could be as detailed as individual works of art. Hieroglyphic writing dates to 3200 BC, and is composed of some 500 symbols. Different forms of hieroglyphs were used as late as the 4th century AD, but towards the end only a small handful of priests could read them. The monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased completely after the closing of all non-Christian temples in AD 391 by the Roman Emperor Theodosius I. The last known inscription is from Philae, known as the The Graffito of Esmet-Akhom, from AD 396, and with that was lost the key to translating the meaning of the mysterious hieroglyphs for 1400 years.
Attempts were made to decipher it in the Byzantine and Islamic periods of Egypt, but only in 1822, after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and years of research by Thomas Young and Jean-Francois Champollion, were hieroglyphs almost fully deciphered.
French Army engineer Captain Pierre-Francois Bouchard discovered the stone in mid-July 1799 while guiding construction work at Fort Julien near the Egyptian port city of Rashid (which the Europeans, in their persistence not to learn Arabic, called Rosetta). But after Napolean’s forces lost in Egypt, the Stone made its way to English shores in February, 1802. What was special about the Rosetta stone was that the carved text on it was made up of three translations of a single passage: two in Egyptian language scripts (hieroglyphic and Demotic) and one in classical Greek. Now people knew how to translate classical Greek, and Thomas Young and Jean-Francois Champollion also learnt how to translate the Demotic script by using Coptic, a similar language to Demotic. Then using both the Demotic and the classical Greek scripts, Champollion managed to finally translate the hieroglyphs. He found out that a square meant P, a lion represented L, O was represented by a hangman’s noose, a semi circle meant a T. And in this way he managed to formulate an alphabet to translate the remaining text.
So what did the Rosetta Stone actually say? In essence it is a tax amnesty given to the temple priests of the day, restoring the tax privileges they had traditionally enjoyed from more ancient times. It said:
In the reign of the new king who was Lord of the diadems, great in glory, the stabilizer of Egypt, but also pious in matters relating to the gods, superior to his adversaries, rectifier of the life of men, Lord of the thirty-year periods like Hephaestus the Great, King like the Sun, the Great King of the Upper and Lower Lands, offspring of the Parent-loving gods, whom Hephaestus has approved, to whom the Sun has given victory, living image of Zeus, Son of the Sun, Ptolemy the ever-living, beloved by Ptah…
It seems that even then people really disliked taxes, but really liked self-glorification.
Latin and its refusal to die
Latin is considered a dead language. It was the language of the ancient Romans. As the Roman Empire grew, Latin spread to countries around the Mediterranean, including a large part of Europe. Many languages like Aragonese, Corsican, Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish, are descended from Latin while many other languages have inherited and acquired much of their vocabulary from it.
While in its heyday Latin was spoken across the Roman Empire, with the fall of the Western Roman Empire its use began to decline. The populous of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) used a form of Greek that evolved into modern Greek, even though the administration assumed names and titles that had come from Latin. And that has always been the story of Latin. Even though it is not used in everyday conversations, it somehow finds its use in society.
The Catholic Church famously still uses Latin. Ecclesiastical Latin (sometimes called Church Latin) is the Latin used by the Catholic Church. The Holy See has no obligation to use Latin as its official language and, in theory, could change its practice. However, such a change appears unlikely in the foreseeable future. As a language no longer in common use, Latin has the advantage that the meaning of its words are less likely to change radically from century to century. This helps to ensure theological precision and to safeguard orthodoxy. Since Latin is spoken as a native language by no modern community, the language is thought to be a universal, internally consistent means of communication without regional bias. Accordingly, recent Popes have actually reaffirmed the importance of Latin for the Church.
Latin was the international language of science and scholarship in central and western Europe until the 17th century, when it was gradually replaced by local languages. However, Latin has persevered in scientific terminology. Taxonomy of species, medical nomenclature, chemical element names all seem to have their roots in Greek or Latin. That is why even many university science courses in Europe offer to teach Latin to students.
Shhh… it’s Sign Language
My medical course required me to study sign language for the last year. And contrary to what I believed, sign language isn’t just about replacing one English or Bangla word with a hand gesture or a facial cue. It has its own grammar and syntax. So when somebody is speaking British Sign Language for example, he is not merely replacing each word in his English sentence with a sign, he is actually speaking a different language. A sign language will have its own set of alphabet. A single sign can express just an alphabet, a word or even a short sentence.
Most of us know some basic forms of sign language because we use it to supplement our spoken language. For example forming a C shape with your hands and bringing it close to your mouth indicates you want to drink water. A thumbs up usually means okay, except in Bangladesh, Iraq, Iran and Thailand where it is considered offensive.
Different countries usually have different sign languages. So America has American Sign Language, Britain has British Sign Language. Even within a country, the language will differ geographically, just like there are dialects in spoken language. Bangladesh doesn’t have its own sign language yet, but it is in the process of being made.
Can you speak Na’vi, Klingon and Elvish and all things alien?
When it comes to setting the bar for fictional language, J.R.R. Tolkein made history with his epic Lord of the Rings. He created multiple languages for Elves, which eventuated in the creation of a mythology (expounded in his books), complete with races, to speak the tongues he had constructed. He originally called the first primitive form of Elvish “Qenya”. This was later called Quenya (High-elven) and is one of the two most complete of Tolkien’s languages (the other being Sindarin, or Grey-elven).
For those of you not familiar with the fictional world of Star Trek, the Klingons are a violent alien race who is the enemy of the Federation. They have their own refined language and alphabet, designed by Marc Okrand. A small number of people, mostly dedicated Star Trek fans or language aficionados, can converse in Klingon. Its vocabulary, heavily centered on Star Trek-Klingon concepts such as ‘spacecraft’ or ‘warfare’, can sometimes make it cumbersome for everyday use – for instance, while there are words for ‘transporter ionizer unit’ (jolvoy’) or ‘bridge (of a ship)’ (meH), there is currently no word for ‘bridge’ in the sense of a crossing over water. Nonetheless, mundane conversations are common among skilled speakers. Perhaps we all ought to give Klingon Boggle a try. Or if we are interested read the famous Shakespearean tragedy, Hamlet, in Klingon.
The most recent alien language is the language spoken by the Na’vi, the 10 feet tall intelligent extraterrestrial blue humanoids who inhabit the lush jungle moon of Pandora from the movie Avatar. It is the brainchild of Professor Paul Frommer, a linguistics expert from the University of Southern California. The language currently runs to about a thousand words. It does not have a huge vocabulary, but Professor Frommer is still working at it. He is also still trying to master his own language. If u want to say ‘alien word’ in Na’vi, you say ‘ketuwong lì’u’, presuming of course that you are referring to a male alien.
While talking about alien languages, what if you wanted to talk to a real alien? How do we communicate with them? What language will they speak? Don’t worry the best minds of our generation are working on it. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) projects use scientific methods to search for electromagnetic transmissions from civilizations on distant planets. And while we were at it, we sent our own first interstellar radio broadcast in November 1974. Broadcasts like that contains basic scientific or mathematical principles because although we may be light years apart and our languages might be very different, the basic physical laws of the universe and the abstract mathematical principles hold true wherever we are. The messages also contain human altruism just in case the aliens do understand us and plan to blow us up!