Tuesday, September 20, 2016
blog post
I think they would disagree because John McWhorter believes that when language dies that means that people are coming together and that's a good thing. Anzaldua believes that everybody is their language and if you take your language away you are taking away your ethnic identity. For example , in How to Tame A Wild Tongue Anzaldua says that, "Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity - I am my language." From this example we can see that, Anzaldua believes that your language is you and if you take that away then who are you?
I believe that we should keep different languages and cultures alive because that how we keep this world diverse . That's how we get different foods and materials for our everyday usage. Most of our products we use to eat or entertain ourselves with are from another country. If this world becomes down to one language then the world is going to be boring and everybody going to start to look and act like each other. A lot of products we have are going to start to diminish and the economy is going to fall. For example cruises, the companies that run the organization are going to go out of business because nobody is going to want on a cruise to a place is the same to where they live. People take cruises to go see different islands and do things they don't do on a daily basis.
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Denerick, you make an interesting point in your blog post, but the example which you use to support Anzaldua’s claims is discussed in The Cosmopolitan Tongue and is clearly partial to your own desires. The understanding that language assimilation is equivalent to cultural assimilation is an incorrect one, due to the fact that the creation of language in modern times is usually due to geographical drifting (page 431) inside of a single culture, therefore the opposite – assimilation, or language death – is dependent on the culture, and the culture itself is independent of its language(s). This detachment supports the fact that although many different ‘places where cruises go to’ could speak a common language, it won’t necessarily mean they will have the same culture. Even the functionality of tourism or vacationing could be put into question, due to the fact that universal importance on a much larger time scale is consistently used as a control for John McWhorter in his passage, meaning the archaically interesting value of older cultures and languages is only applicable for those interested in studying or admiring it, such as professional linguistics or anthropologists (page 432); simply wanting to maintain a culture based wholly on its precedence as a tourist attraction or vacation spot is utterly impure and could never hold up as a logical infrastructure when arguing the importance of language or culture, and fails to support your argument.
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