Friday, May 18, 2007

The Language of Dominion

One upon a time, reading and writing was a luxury to be experienced only by land and slave owners, but this is a basic fact in all cultures so many thousands of years ago. It was common then for conquering rulers to try completely erasing the language of the conquered and replacing it with their own.

But, one of the earliest giant leaps of human development before being able to depict three dimensional perspective, was the jump in language from iconic to symbolic representation, in other words, the giant leap from cave drawings through Egyptian hieroglyphs to alphanumeric expressions.

Thousands of years ago we had to adopt a common language for survival, but whose language? Remember, there were no public schools back then. Literacy was a privilege for those few who had amassed fortunes and had no need for work in the fields. They were the masters of slaves and the descendants of masters of slaves.

As the race for domination through proliferation of symbols and language was well underway three thousand years ago, along the way, symbols such as Egyptian Hieroglyphs were no longer used, replaced by the concept of a simple alphabet of symbols representing sounds people make to communicate meaning.

Instead of communicating the direct meaning of things through icons (a picture of a bird meaning a bird), we began to communicate using someone else’s symbols that showed how their mouth moved to make the sound they uttered which they taught us to mean something, like the word “Bird.”

They taught us this because they dominated us. Your language comes from some ancient king who commanded an army to slaughter your original tribe. Do you think that your language is still viable after so many thousands of years of human development? What other ridiculous notions did this king thrust upon your ancestors?

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