Am I This Person, or That One?

Mayowa Osibodu
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read

03. The Appearance of Tractability.

Berlin, December 2016.

It’s a chilly evening.

I’m on my way back from the grocery store, full bags in hand. I’m wearing a stiff leather jacket I bought from a thrift shop in San Francisco. I always called it my “proud jacket”, because I felt it made me appear like a proud person; table-edge shoulders, militia style pockets, upturned collar and all.

It’s cold, but not cold enough to snow. There’s a thin layer of frost on the windshield of the stiff cars lining the cobblestone sidewalk.

I think to myself: Frost is nothing like snow. It’s not really that special. Practically everyone has encountered frost one way or another- we had frost in our deep freezer back in Nigeria.

— — — — —

Back to Nigeria.

— — — — —

It’s been more than a year since the magnitude of the possible discrepancy in development between different locations, cannoned into my awareness. The dissonance has had more than a year to gestate in my mind, being churned along with my other thoughts. Slowly developing in the backdrop of studying and classes and skateboarding and assignments.

The thoughts have become a lot more refined since then- a lot more precise, a lot more finely sculpted.

As I walk down Adalbertstrasse in the direction of the apartment I’m lodged in by Minerva, a question imposes itself on the stage of my mind:

What words exist in a language, that do not exist in any others?

Others follow:

How does the (non)existence of these words, influence what perspectives the concerned speakers have of the world, and consequently, their resulting ways of life?

Are there valuable ways of thinking the structure of a language facilitates, that are just inconceivable in other languages?

You see, in San Francisco I became aware of the fact that some locations on the earth were just unarguably, unabashedly, objectively, “better” than others. More valuable than others. More comfort-supportive than others.

What I obstinately desisted in accepting however, was that this discrepancy in value could be applied to the people that lived in these locations.

Do you mean to tell me that the people who live in San Francisco are more valuable than those in the (considerably) rural town of Mowe?

More valuable how?

More valuable on what metric?

Yes yes, this place might be more beautiful- might be much more well developed, true. However I refuse to believe that the same relation applies to the two different groups of people. I refuse to accept that, no. No no no I refuse.

How then could I resolve this conflict? If a place can be said to be objectively better than another, then why should said relation not apply to the people who inhabit those places?

Fast forward a year and half of processing, and my focus had gradually narrowed down on language:

The language spoken in a place, encapsulates the ways of thinking of the people in that place. If it were possible to somehow capture the essence of this language, scrutinize it, and analyze it relative to other languages, then it just might be possible to discover what differences in the exemplified ways of thinking, led to the discrepancies in development of the different societies.

For example, the Icelandic people have over forty words for snow- Snow being a severely familiar phenomenon for them. The Yoruba people in Nigeria however, have none — because snow is practically unheard of in original Yoruba culture.

In a very similar vein, could the words that exist (or do not exist) in a language, serve as indicators for what concepts the speakers of these languages pay attention to?

What problems they focus on solving?

How they solve these problems?

How their society and physical environment are gradually transformed as a result?

Yes, San Francisco is an impressively advanced place. The United States is considerably well developed.

However, there exists the question:

Are there problems that say, the traditional Yoruba people- in all of their flamboyant ruralness, have solved, that the English people have not?

I found this to be an irresistibly interesting question.

It posed munition against the overbearing dissonance I previously found myself beplagued by.

The more general case:

Are there problems that have been solved in the less prevalent, more relegated, “less important” languages in the world, that have not been solved in any others?

A discomforting question:

What would happen to these solved problems if these languages were left to die? If no one spoke them anymore because everyone was migrating to say, English and French?

Would that not imply a grossly under-appreciated setback for humanity as a whole?

These questions made me happy. There seemed to be hope for the underdog after all, there seemed to be hope.

— — — — —

Upheaval intersected attenuation. Uncertainty proliferated along future paths.

Mayowa Osibodu

Written by

Agonist. Type II error. Counterfactual. https://about.me/mayowaosibodu

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