I finally published something on Substack, for those who may be interested:
Are all languages equally complex?
julianabarembuem.substack.com
I dedicated it to
@Laurs who for the last couple of years, every time she visits us here, asks me when I'm finally going to write SOMETHING!
All feedback welcome, of course.
I have never seen myself as a writer, and that's one of the reasons why it's taking me so long to do it. But after 4 years of intensive reading, I need to share more. Besides, "do what it doesn't like", right? It may be too "nerdy", and my writing style definitely needs improvement, but I'm hoping to also make it interesting for those of you who like languages or language in general. I am also planning more videos, but some things are just better conveyed in writing, IMO.
Hello Juliana, thank you so much for your articles and your videos on linguistics! I was eagerly waiting for a new video on your youtube channel and even checked it a few days ago to see if I missed any new videos, and here you are posting a new article).
I am a linguist too, and have been interested in finding how languages originate in a hope of understanding the art got, the archetypal language.
After studying many modern and old languages to a different extent, including some aboriginal languages of Africa, Australia, Siberia and the Americas, I came to the conclusion that the "Tower of Babel" event happened only in the human consciousness/perception (conditioned by changed physicality). So, it is not the languages that changed. It is our perception of them that changed. ONE UNIFIED language exists and always existed. But people lost that understanding. Modern people understand words in a more literal/flat way, as opposed to understanding speech multidimensionally from all angels simultaneously as some sort of a multifaceted gem. This multi-angle approach allows one to see concepts of speech in their entire volume, without choosing only one common faucet of a word.
I think this is how the biblical "fall" is described: only one (apple) out of the entirety of the multitude was chosen, causing a limitation in understanding the language and the world. Another mythological example could be the deadly gaze of meduza turning everything into stone,because if the understanding of a word is based only on one faucet (literal way of looking at words), and not based on the entirety of the meaning looked from all angles at once, this word becomes discrete or separated from other meanings and other languages. I think all religions, all myths, all stories talk about it. When words are viewed only from one point of view (not all at once) the connection between concepts is lost, the multilevel understanding of reality is lost, the fluidity of the mind is lost, the connections between all world languages are lost.
But if we understand the deep meaning of a word we can understand ALL world languages.
Understanding of words and languages comes with understanding of life as a cycle, as a torus-shaped flow perhaps. I think the concept of the Wave the Cs talk about fits here perfectly (based on how I understand it at this moment). For example, after I grouped all the most common root words of all languages into categories, I saw that consonants are less fluid, and therefore more stable to preserve the structure of a root. After that I boiled them down to 2-3 consonant only roots. (I say “boil” because the studying of language reminds me.of an alchemical process). At this level I started seeing that many world languages are very similar and could be understood for the most part. After that I started seeing that consonants are not as constant as I thought, they metamorphosize one into another and that they have also a fluid cyclical nature in which everything flows and never stops changing. Sort of like the concept of ouroboros, or infinity. At this point I understood that all languages, all words boil down to a few archetypal meanings, which can ultimately be viewed as one. But if needed it can be separated back into myriads of words and languages. This is a very fast and rough explanation. It is always fun to go into details and see how a word transforms before your very eyes as its multidimensional meaning is being revealed.
I think this algorithm can be applied to everything else that exists, including DNA. Speech as a phenomenon can be called immortal for as long as there is someone who can speak; on a descrete/non-abstract scale languages appear to be different from one another, but on the grand cycle of things all languages can be understood by an individual as one. DNA exists and develops on a similar basis: discretness and the illusion of life and death on a small scale vs immortality/neverending continuity of life as a whole on a large scale.
So, are all languages equally complex? I would say yes and no depending on the level of abstraction and the angle we chose to look at it. On the most abstract level all languages boil down to one concept: ouroboros, the cycle of life, the Wave
