February 8, 2008
Babel
I was telling a Brit friend of mine that there’s a move underway in our land to make English the official language.
“Finally,” he said. “We thought you never would. We’d given up over here altogether.” He paused for a moment, then added, “But where would you get enough trained teachers, for heaven’s sake?” Then he sighed, “Well, it is a noble idea, but don’t you really think it’s rather late?”
I hardly knew what to say. I certainly didn’t want to tell him that those who oppose the movement — and there’s quite a majority — are being labeled as traitors who should be convicted of treason and at best exiled as unpatriotic, if not just hung. Frankly I was embarrassed, first because I feared he might agree, but actually because this kind of name-calling is such a typical reaction by those whose insecurity and violent, mean-spirited mindset is altogether consistent with illiteracy.
Thankfully, he was courteous enough not to mention he was already quite aware of our current president’s considerable lack in language skills. That concerned me, too, for one cannot help but wonder and need not be reminded about what hardships making English official would probably work on him.
We both agreed that if one would succeed in an alien land, one must surely learn the indigenous language, whatever it might be, though that never meant giving up or not using one’s own. But then we remembered what God did about the Tower of Babel and those folk getting all uppity because they were so proud of having an official language. Thanks to them, we’ve now got over 6700 languages in the world, Pentecost to the contrary.
After we disconnected, I recalled how many lives were saved in World War II by Native American soldiers. They would encode top secret plans in their unbreakable tribal languages then translate them for those whose only official language was English.
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