Today we visited the Planet Word museum. It was an incredible immersion into the history and art of language. I learned that 40% of languages that exist today are endangered. Among about 6000 languages in the world there are only 23 that are used.

Languages get endangered for many reasons. The main reason for endangerment is due to conflicts between cultures, which leads to language repression. Some languages that are disappearing: Irish Gaelic, Yiddish, Ladino, Kurdish, Hawaiian, Navajo or Lakota.

To raise awareness about endangered and Indigenous languages, professionals recommend writing books for children in the language and to sing songs in it.

It was also fun to learn about conlang, a language that has been artificially created, mainly for books and movies. One of the conlang creators is J.R.R. Tolkien. There are a few conlangs: sindarin, esperanto, klingon, dothraki, toki pona and heptapod B. Heptapod B sounds really interesting, it got me interested in the movie it comes from. The time for movie characters is non-linearly, so their language symbols are circular.

There are four main language features, namely: building blocks (sounds, words, signs), rules (how to put building blocks together), infinite combinations (ability to create infinite combinations that make sense), and past, future and imaginary (animal’s cannot talk about things that are not right in front of them, they cannot describe past/future or things that are totally made up).

I am becoming more and more fascinated with words, especially with their etymology. For example, did you know that the meaning of the word “decide” comes from the Latin word, decidere, which is a combination of two words?
Here:
de = ‘off’ +
caedere = ‘cut’
CUT + OFF = DECISION

Language has it all, to decide means to CUT OFF the things that do not matter and you will be left with what really matters to you.

Decision making with vikacoaching.com