Who built Thebes of the 7 gates ? 

In the books you will read the names of kings. 

Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock ? 

And Babylon, many times demolished, 

Who raised it up so many times ? 

Thus begins Bertolt Brecht’s poem Questions From A Worker Who Reads, which asks a question I’ve been wrestling with for a while. Why is our history the way it is? Why do we never hear about the common people, who made civilization’s grand feats possible? More importantly, who wrote it this way? Who decides what is worth remembering, and what isn’t? What happens to the things that aren’t remembered? 

In his book Sum, David Eagleman outlines the three types of death. There is the physical one, of course— - when someone’s body stops functioning. Then there is the material one— - when someone is consigned to the grave, never to be moved or touched again. And after that, perhaps long after that, there is the third death— - the societal death, when someone’s name is spoken for the last time. Every person on earth has or will endure these three deaths at some point. And every thing, every event, every idea, will endure the societal death, as it passes out of our collective memory.

But what about you? Specifically, when will something pass out of your memory? Suffer the “individual” death? For most things, the answer is “instantly.”. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines a word, Olēka, the awareness of how few days are memorable. And it’s true— - the vast, vast majority of days, of moments, will not be remembered at all, falling into the abyss, the deep sea of history from which nothing is ever pulled out again. It’s not right to say they suffered an individual death when, in truth, they had never been born. And this is merely the things you have experienced, just a tiny sliver of the human experience, which is full of people, things, and experiences you have never met and never will. At least your moments can be remembered. Most of the human experience never even gets that chance. 

And yet, they live lives as well. Every thing, which will never be born to your memory, is just as complex, and detailed, and real, as the device you touch right now. Every person, whom you will never meet, never talk to, or never see, lives a life as promising, as tragic, as comedic, as yours. They have their own sorrows, and dreams; fears, and hopes. They are out there, somewhere. 

They don’t have to be far away, either. In the 1990s, evolutionary psychologist Robert Dunbar published a study thatwhich found that we can only cognitively handle 150 social relationships at a time. But there are 1,430 students in the high school alone. When I walk down the halls, I walk past people whom I don’t recognize and never will, who are just people to pass by in the halls and nothing more. Like greyed-out figures, they seem to be extras in my story; people who also happened to be there at the time for the sake of being there. I have seen them hundreds of times, maybe even always in the same hallway, and never stopped once. I probably see some people I don’t know more than thesome people I do. But their journey is parallel to mine; they go through high school at the same pace, they struggle through the same classes and challenges, they talk to their own friends, do their own assignments, and have their own hobbies. Never interacting with me once, they live full lives.  

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows calls this awareness sonder. Sonder is not just a fun phenomenon, but it is the fabric of society. It is’s a foundational belief that makes living in a society possible because it gives us a reason to care about others beyond our own immediate contacts. It enables empathy for people we will never know, and binds everyone together in one common humanity. Each person carries a different background and a different journey, but sonder ties it all together. In that sense, it is like language —- facilitating human connection, and founding our human story. 

Language, of course, is very powerful. Unlike other human traits, language is all-encompassing. It’s more than just words or sounds. Language is culture— - every different part of someone’s geography, background, and tradition makes itstheir mark on the way they express themselves to the world. The language reflects them and the culture they come from, and enables us to see their world, to be aware of their lives, in short, to sonder them. And as humanity has mixed and mingled through history, languages have become just as mixed. Just as we make connections on a personal level, languages make connections at a linguistic level as they speaktalk to each other. These connections contain multitudes— - splits, convergences, language families, and even more aspectsstuff that makes language relationships complicated. 

Linguists have a way of describing all of this chaos, structuring and categorizing all of language to capture how close or far apart they are. They use something called linguistic distance— - a measure of how similar two languages are. Once we know how close every language is to every other language, we can put them into groups of similar languages, and trace out their histories and evolution. Linguistic distance is an extremely useful tool that- and linguists have come to depend on it in a wide variety of fields. 

As is always the case with researchers, however, how to actually measure linguistic distance is hotly debated. Of course, we can intuitively sense when languages are close or far apart to some extent. As a child, I learned Chinese when I was socialized to my family’s Chinese culture and environment. I used to be completely fluent, writing poetry that I would tape to my wall. And then I went to preschool, then kindergarten, and something shifted. English and Chinese are very different— - not only do they have no cognates or similar vocabularies, but the writing systems themselves are completely different, - making thea jump between them tricky for my brain. As I became fluent in English, I began to lose fluency in Chinese. Years later, I remember looking at poems I had written when I was three and being fascinated by how little I could understand. It wasn’t just a different language, - it was a different period of my life—, it was a different me. A glimmer of what I could’ve been, what I could’ve spoken. Even now, I still haven’t fully recovered. 

I take French and Latin now, but I’m not becoming less fluent in English because of it. Part of it is becausethat I’m older and more adaptable, but it’s also true that French and Latin are just closer to English. Humans are a pattern-matching species, and when a new language fits many of the same patterns we’ve seen before, it’s easy to put it in one of the language boxes we’ve already developed in our brains. French and Latin share the same character system, grammar features, and sometimes even the exact same words. Of course it would be easier to learn. 

That is not to say that more similar languages are necessarily better, however. In fact, a diverse body of languages is one of humanity’s greatest treasures. Linguistic distance encodes similarity, but it also encodes diversity— - not just of languages themselves but the culture, art, history, and people that surround them. They are a living, breathing history, and will continue to carry that history into the future, for as long as we are around. 

Except for one problem. Most languages are, unfortunately, dead. Linguists have tried to estimate the total number of languages that have ever existed, and the most conservative estimate says 31,000— - over five times the six thousand languages currently spoken today. The vast majority of languages that have ever existed— - 81%— - will never be spoken again. But this hides a much worse reality. Of the 6,000 languages spoken today, nearly all— - 96%— - of languages are used by just 4% of the population. Thousands are spoken by under 10,000 people, making them extremely vulnerable to extinction. Linguists expect anywhere between 25% to-90% of languages to die within the next century. To meet that timeframe, a language has to die every two weeks. Every time you get your paycheck, another language, a priceless piece of culture and human ingenuity, plunges into the sea of history. Even languages confront the inevitable, the societal death. 

But wait a second. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? Of course it does. Even if we no longer collectively remember something, did it not still change the world? We live with the consequences of actions taken long ago. Just because we know not their cause doesn’t mean they can’t still influence the reality of today. Languages are the same— - their very existence speaks to human creativity, and they are a testament to the diversity of all humans, across time and space. They may pass into the sea but will never pass from the legacy of humanity. 

It’s impossible to predict what future historians will remember about us. What we find worthless, temporary, and useless now might be the historical version of amber fossils and footprints in the future. The entire field of urban archaeology, for instance, is dedicated towards collecting the mundane and unremarkable, like trash or pipes, and extracting the enormous clues they hold about a society. 

What will the historians of the future remember about us? When they can no longer touch our languages, our culture, our way of life, what will they take away? They will cross the linguistic distance which separates us from them, and they will understand the rich lives of the dying languages and the dying people who speak them. That as they moved beyond our world they left behind a legacy, a cultural heritage, which they shaped and imprinted on all of humanity. These languages have their own stories to tell, the last speaker had their own hopes, wishes, and regrets. We are connected by the bonds of sonder across the globe, but the future will sonder us just as we sonder the past. We rest assured knowing that humanity’s great languages will forever last— - rescued, from the sea of history, by sonder. 

I give it five stars. 

Bibliography

Armstrong, Richard. "Language Death." Engines of Our Ingenuity, www.uh.edu/

     engines/epi2723.htm. Accessed 13 Dec. 2022.

Crystal, David. Language Death. 2000, catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam032/

     99053220.pdf. Accessed 13 Dec. 2022.

Eagleman, David. Sum. eagleman.com/excerpt/#:~:text=There%20are%20three%20deaths%3A%20the,spoken%20for%20the%20last%20time.

Gray, Russell D., et al. Language evolution and human history: what a difference

     a date makes. National Library of Medicine, 12 Apr. 2011, https://doi.org/

     10.1098/rstb.2010.0378. Accessed 13 Dec. 2022.

Nelson, Paige. "Sonder." Medium, 4 Jan. 2021, medium.com/@paigenelson_22665/

     Sonder-7cca8be96b8a.

"Questions From a Worker Who Reads." Bertolt Brecht Internet Archive,

     www.marxists.org/archive/brecht/works/1935/questions.htm.