A word is power.
sovay wrote a very cool entry on language and ancestry and the dizzying dream of a New Alexandria (will the library still be one in which fishes can read?). I commented in kind, finishing up with this paragraph:
I know one language, the boiled-down essence of the ones my most recent ancestors spoke, or the corrupted mishmash of same, depending on who you ask. I figure, family was speaking the doom of heroes and the end of gods, the loss of Faerie and old country and way of life, was singing fish into nets and schooners across prairies and angels down from the heavens to point west. They handed me this tangled wood bordered by boiling seas, thrust through with mountains. I don't know if I'm cutting at the root or hanging on a branch, but I speak it in this tongue, my tongue. I can make the sounds that waves make and say bramble, thorn, pomegranate. I can read a compass. There is a berg in my maiden name, raven, wolf, rune in the one I wear now. They serve.
I know one language, the boiled-down essence of the ones my most recent ancestors spoke, or the corrupted mishmash of same, depending on who you ask. I figure, family was speaking the doom of heroes and the end of gods, the loss of Faerie and old country and way of life, was singing fish into nets and schooners across prairies and angels down from the heavens to point west. They handed me this tangled wood bordered by boiling seas, thrust through with mountains. I don't know if I'm cutting at the root or hanging on a branch, but I speak it in this tongue, my tongue. I can make the sounds that waves make and say bramble, thorn, pomegranate. I can read a compass. There is a berg in my maiden name, raven, wolf, rune in the one I wear now. They serve.