by Maria Souza Mundi » Thu Dec 05, 2019 8:07 pm
The borders of my language are the borders of my world: this is one of the most well known sentences of Wittgenstein, the late 19th century philosopher.
What he meant is that we cannot know beyond our language, as there’s no way to get to understand that that cannot be named. So, wouldn’t this mean too, that the more languages are preserved, the more things we can name and the more things we can know?
Every time a language dies, the entire culture behind it dies too. There are words that only exist in a language or a couple of them, and from which there’s no direct translation because they belong to a very particular cultural context.
I think we should try to preserve all this richness somehow, as loosing all this cultural heritage would be a pity for us all.
The borders of my language are the borders of my world: this is one of the most well known sentences of Wittgenstein, the late 19th century philosopher.
What he meant is that we cannot know beyond our language, as there’s no way to get to understand that that cannot be named. So, wouldn’t this mean too, that the more languages are preserved, the more things we can name and the more things we can know?
Every time a language dies, the entire culture behind it dies too. There are words that only exist in a language or a couple of them, and from which there’s no direct translation because they belong to a very particular cultural context.
I think we should try to preserve all this richness somehow, as loosing all this cultural heritage would be a pity for us all.
