Antiquitopia

Or perhaps it is a veritable Noah's ark of language. New York has become a refuge for dying languages. According to a recent New York Times article , New York may be home to around 800 distinct languages! Different languages from pockets in Eastern Europe, African tribes, and what might interest biblicists...Aramaic! Mandaic! In addition to dozens of Native American languages, vulnerable foreign languages that researchers say are spoken in New York include Aramaic, Chaldic and Mandaic from the Semitic family; Bukhari (a Bukharian Jewish language, which has more speakers in Queens than in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan), Chamorro (from the Mariana Islands), Irish Gaelic, Kashubian (from Poland), indigenous Mexican languages, Pennsylvania Dutch, Rhaeto-Romanic (spoken in Switzerland) and Romany (from the Balkans) and Yiddish.

It seems like I am thinking about Babel/Babble lately with my last post and just (re)reading "Library of Babel" by Borges. I had read this short story in college, and it has persisted in my memory ever since. This library is eternal and infinite. Each room is a hexagon with the same number of shelves and books on each wall (except two). Two walls lead to adjacent hexagons, while a spiral staircase infinitely moves up and down to different floors with ever new hexagons. There are no two books alike in the library, but the books contain all possible combinations of twenty-five symbols, with all possible syntaxes, languages, books, writing, and, well, babble. As such, this same blog posting will be already found somewhere in the library (as well as any past and future postings I may write and miswrite). The inhabitants of this library are called librarians. The main character is a librarian who has been searching for the book of books, the catalogue of catalogues, all of...

Sitting one Sunday in a Pentecostal service, I listened as someone began to “speak in tongues.” Such occurrences have a strange effect on me. I grew up in this church, and have noticed a sharp decline in the past decade or so of people speaking in tongues (and a slight recent resurgence), and so, at least psychologically, there is a strange feeling of comfort, of reminiscences of my childhood when such utterances occasionally occur. I care much less for the so-called “interpretation” afterwards, the attempt to make this excitable speech intelligible. It always seems like a betrayal of that speech, which, as excitable, should remain unknowable. At the same time, I am a scholar of religion. I cannot but think about that this is a phenomenon that occurs in multiple contexts throughout the world, whether a Shaman on the Eurasian Steppes (you can also see it in the movie Kundun , about the life of the current Dalai Lama), the Pythia in ancient Delphi, or a Pentecostal service in twent...