RAINBOW IN A PUDDLE
Rainbow spots appear on wet pavement after rain. This thin layer of gasoline, being unable to dissolve in water, "plays" in the sunlight with our sensations. And we are seeing all the colors of the rainbow, whimsically spreading on the surface of the water. The physicist will say, "This is the interference of light." But I'm not a physicist.
For me, as a linguist, this is a model of the world language. Not languages, but one language, the one language of mankind. Just as gasoline “plays with light” on the surface of the water, so does the single language which plays with our feelings on the surface of the Earth. We clearly feel different languages and our consciousness refuses to believe that, in fact, it is the same language that is being refracted. The language of the voice, the language of the tongue in the mouth.
Linguists, speculating on our subjective feelings, reinforce our delusions with their theories. This is how DIFFERENT languages appear: Serbian and Croatian, Romanian and Moldovan, Macedonian and Bulgarian, Czech and Slovak, Russian and Ukrainian, etc. Differences between them are highlighted and their similarities are obscured.
Languages, like animals in a zoo, find themselves in captivity of scientific illusions. Each one in its own cage (in the so-called "family").
And behind the fence of this scientific "menagerie" there are living free sounds, words and phrases of human speech. They are grazing, flying, swiming and crawling in the wild. They interpenetrate from one community of speakers to another, forming transitional forms like "bridges" between language and language.
Yes, we are clearly seeing and admire the rainbow. This is a beautiful optical illusion. a waking dream. The mind tells us that we see the same sunlight, only in a reflected, distorted form. Not entirely, like white light, but divided into parts.
While admiring your native language, it would not be bad to remember that this beloved language of the ancestors, the mother tongue, is just a speck on the carpet of the common language of earthlings.