{"id":28360,"date":"2021-03-24T12:20:13","date_gmt":"2021-03-24T11:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/?p=28360"},"modified":"2021-03-24T12:20:13","modified_gmt":"2021-03-24T11:20:13","slug":"foreword","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/foreword\/","title":{"rendered":"Foreword"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"project":[353,795],"project_type":[],"class_list":["post-28360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","project-online-publications","project-untranslatable"],"acf":{"bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","custom_color_css_variable":"","content_type":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"Those who live between languages see them. The barriers drawn through linguistic worlds.\r\n\r\nThose who live between languages know them. The limitations of translation. The impossibility. It is as if you had to squeeze a whole world through the eye of a needle.\r\n\r\nBecause when you translate \u2013 from one language to another \u2013 it is not \u00bbjust\u00ab words for which you seek a counterpart. Instead, you require an equivalent for wide, complex, multifaceted contexts. A perspective. A specific way of regarding the world.\r\n

Puhpowee<\/em>.\r\n\u00bbthe force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.\u00ab1<\/sup><\/p>\r\nWhen biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer first read the word Puhpowee<\/em> \u2013 a word from the language of her ancestors, the Citizen Potawatomi, an indigenous people of North America \u2013 she was amazed that such a word even existed. As a biologist, scientist, and botanist, she felt the gap that the absence of this word in other languages created in her, but also in science.\r\n\r\nBecause what happens when you use the word Puhpowee<\/em>? How do you view the world? In fact, another question seems even more remarkable: From which perspective do you regard the world<\/em>? You look at the world from the perspective of the earth. Not from above, looking down at the plants that grow up to meet you, the human being. But from below, the very bottom. You look at the world from the earth\u2019s perspective, up into the sky, past the human beings who constantly believe themselves to be at the very center of the world.\r\n\r\nHow would we speak differently had we lived in a language that revealed the world to us from the earth\u2019s viewpoint? A language like that of the Citizen Potawatomi, in which plants are not spoken of disparagingly as \u00bbit,\u00ab but rather referred to as respectfully as humans, because they are understood as living beings that also have a perspective on this world? How would our perception change? How would we live differently? How would our relationship with the earth, with nature change? In an interview, Kimmerer described a situation in which she asked her environmental science students the following question. She asked: Do you love the earth?\r\n

They wholeheartedly agree that they love the earth. But when I ask them the question; \u00bbDoes the earth love you back?\u00ab there\u2019s a great deal of hesitation and reluctance and eyes cast down, like, oh, gosh, I don\u2019t know. Are we even allowed to talk about that? That would mean that the earth had agency and that I was not an anonymous little blip on the landscape, that I was known by my home place.<\/p>\r\nThe language of the Thaayorre in northern Australia is particularly impressive with regard to the perception of space and time. In Kuuk Thaayorre, no words for left and right exist; instead, the Thaayorre use cardinal points, saying, for instance: There\u2019s an ant on your northwest arm. Or: Can you please push the cup to the south-southeast? Members of the Thaayorre people can accurately name the cardinal directions even in closed and roofed rooms as early as the ages of four or five.2<\/sup> When two Thaayorre meet, they ask each other where the other is going when greeting each other \u2013 so the speakers are already encouraged to name the cardinal direction during small talk, which is such an elementary and self-evident part of their language and perception. When Lera Boroditsky tried to learn Kuuk Thaayorre, she experienced the following:\r\n

I had this cool experience when I was there. You know, I was trying to stay oriented because people were treating me like I was pretty stupid for not being oriented, and that hurt. And so I was trying to keep track of which way is which. And one day, I was walking along, and I was just staring at the ground. And all of a sudden, I noticed that there was a new window that had popped up in my mind, and it was like a little bird\u2019s-eye view of the landscape that I was walking through, and I was a little red dot that was moving across the landscape. And then when I turned, this little window stayed locked on the landscape, but it turned in my mind\u2019s eye. And as soon as I saw that happen, I thought, oh, this makes it so much easier. Now I can stay oriented.<\/p>\r\nWhen she told some Thaayorre people about what she considered her strange experience, they laughed and asked how else people should find their bearings in this world.3<\/sup>\r\n\r\nWith its grammatical structures, rules, and norms, our language not only influences our perception of space, but also our perception of time. How does time flow for you? If I were to ask you, as a German or English speaker, to arrange images of a person chronologically from birth to old age, you would probably place childhood images on your left and arrange them by age stretching to the right. In all Latin languages, we write and read from left to right, comprehending time accordingly. Hebrew or Arabic speakers would do the opposite, arranging the images from right to left. But how would the Thaayorre arrange the pictures? The answer is sometimes from left to right, sometimes from right to left, sometimes from front to back, sometimes from back to front \u2013 depending on how the subject is sitting at the time. For Thaayorre, time flows from east to west. So if the subject were facing north, they would arrange the images from right to left. If they were facing the opposite direction, they would logically also arrange the images the other way around.\r\n\r\nThis perception of time and the world had a lasting impression on me. We can only truly comprehend the world view in and with which we were raised when we see it comparatively. Everything revolves around us \u2013 indeed around the \u00bbI\u00ab and its individual perception. I revolve, and so does the world with me. What would it be like if we spoke a language like Kuuk Thaayorre, which constantly reminds us that we are nothing more than a small dot on a huge map; that time flows over us, regardless of the \u00bbI\u00ab perspective? With what principles, what humility would we regard other people, living beings, nature?\r\n\r\nAnd what happens when these languages are no longer spoken? What do we lose? We lose far more than just words. Far more than yet another name for something we all perceive and see. We lose a perspective on this world. We lose eyes. We lose what is beyond the narrow confines of our respective languages.\r\n\r\nLike thousands of other indigenous children, Robin Wall Kimmerer\u2019s grandfather was taken from his family when he was nine years old and forced to live for years in a boarding school where children were forcibly assimilated and not allowed to speak their native languages. Today, many indigenous languages in North America are endangered, including Potawatomi. One summer, Kimmerer attended a course to learn the language of her ancestors. The language class was eagerly anticipated, Kimmerer writes, because all the living speakers of Potawatomi were expected teach. And they came. On canes, with walking aids, in wheelchairs. Kimmerer counted them: \u00bbNine. Nine fluent speakers. In the whole world. Our language, millennia in the making, sits in those nine chairs. The words that praised creation, told the old stories, lulled my ancestors to sleep, rests today in the tongues of nine very mortal men and women.\u00ab4<\/sup>\r\n

One of the men told them how his mother hid him when the children were abducted, how he stayed behind as a \u00bbcarrier of the language.\u00ab The man turned to the group: \u00bbWe\u2019re the end of the road. We are all that is left. If you young people do not learn, the language will die. The missionaries and the U.S. government will have their victory at last.\u00ab<\/p>\r\nThen, Kimmerer said, an elderly woman pushed her walker close to the microphone and said: \u00bbIt\u2019s not just the words that will be lost. The language is the heart of our culture; it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world. It\u2019s too beautiful for English to explain.\u00ab5<\/sup>\r\n\r\nNo language captures the whole world. Each language captures it only partially. Each language only grasps and experiences as much as those people who have power and dominion within a language. Each linguistic world only reaches as far as the perception of the rulers and the powerful does. That is why people who wander back and forth between languages are necessary and crucial. People who extend languages, expand them. These are people who \u2013 although and precisely because they do not belong to the powerful and ruling class \u2013 introduce new perspectives into languages, along with their broad contexts, complexity and richness of facets.\r\n\r\nPeople who know the meaning of aciziyet: weakness, helplessness, incapacity<\/em> are the words that automatic translation software offers me when I search for an equivalent of this Turkish word. But aciziyet<\/em> means so much more. A word that makes me look at the world from the bottom up. To feel powerlessness and helplessness, the absence of possibilities, the unattainability of things \u2013 and to endure. Yet I don\u2019t consider this term negative. There is a strange freedom associated with it. For aciziyet<\/em> also evokes the calm perception of a situation\r\n\r\nto which a person is exposed. A liberated acceptance of one\u2019s life circumstances. Not humiliating inferiority, but respectful deference. Perhaps the prudent, emancipated awareness of our nullity is one of the few truths we can grasp in its completeness. Our<\/em> aciziyet<\/em>.\r\n\r\nTo stand at the edge of our linguistic horizon, we must be aware of its existence. Our aciziyet<\/em>. Our dependence on all those people who view the world differently than we do. So that we may be able to stand at the edge of our linguistic horizon and cross it with the help of others; into another language, into words that may not yet even exist.\r\n\r\n\u00bbMapalus<\/em> is understood by the indigenous and diasporic Minahasan communities as a form of mutual aid,\u00ab writes Natasha Tontey \u2013 and thus describing not only a word, but also revealing an attitude to life and a philosophy which places people in relation to each other and to nature. A word that embodies a philosophy that could act as a model beyond the space of this language.\r\n\r\n\u00bbMicch\u0101mi Dukka\u1e0da\u1e43<\/em>,\u00ab explains Nishant Shah, means \u00bbMay all evil that has been done, be in vain.\u00ab Words that are meant to rob evil of its power and strength. They can also mean \u00bbI ask pardon from all living beings.\u00ab The performative power of language, for both good and evil, is symbolized by this word. Every word in the Shared Vocabulary conveys the power of language, which assumes different forms all over the world.\r\n\r\nThis vocabulary attempts the impossible. To enlarge the eye of the needle of the languages we speak. To reveal new perspectives from other languages. To broaden our view of the world. To break down barriers between languages. To free us from their limitations. To recognize humans elsewhere, the \u00bbother\u00ab, for what they are \u2013 human beings.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n

Ku\u0308bra Gu\u0308mu\u0308\u015fay<\/strong> is the author of the best-selling non-fiction book Sprache und Sein<\/em> (Language und Being), published by Hanser Berlin in spring 2020. She is cofounder of eeden, a feminist cocreation space in Hamburg, as well as numerous campaigns and associations \u2013 including the anti-racism campaign #SchauHin; the feminist alliance #ausnahmslos, which was awarded the Clara Zetkin Women\u2019s Award in 2016; and the campaign \u00bbOrganisierte Liebe\u00ab (Organized Love). She is a fellow of the Progressive Center and Associate Expert at the Center for Intersectional Justice. Her blog, \u00bbein-fremdwoerterbuch.com\u00ab was nominated for the Grimme Online Award in 2011. In 2018, Forbes magazine ranked her among the top 30 under 30 in Europe in media and marketing.<\/p>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_footnotes","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Fu\u00dfnoten","bgcolor":"","footnotes_list_hide_numbers":false,"footnotes":[{"footnote":"\u00bbI stumbled upon it in a book by the Anishinaabe ethnobotanist Keewaydinoquay, in a treatise on the traditional uses of fungi by our people. Puhpowee, she explained, translates as \u203athe force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.\u2039\u00ab Robin Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass, Minneapolis 2013, p. 49."},{"footnote":"The first Western observation of this kind was made by sociolinguist Stephen Levinson, and his research contributed significantly to the more prominent discussion of the linguistic relativity hypothesis in academic discourse. https:\/\/pdfs.semanticscholar.org\/400c\/4086205ebbfacf938478d- 5b73ea9eb4b052a.pdf <\/a>\r\n\r\nSee also Caleb Everett: Linguistic Relativity. Evidence Across Languages and Cognitive Domains<\/em>, Berlin 2013, p. 20."},{"footnote":"\u00bbLost In Translation,\u00ab Hidden Brain<\/em> podcast (January 29, 2018), National Public Radio. https:\/\/www.npr.org\/transcripts\/581657754<\/a> (accessed January 16, 2020)."},{"footnote":"Kimmerer: (2013), p. 50."},{"footnote":"Ibid."}]}],"intro_preview_headline":"K\u00fcbra G\u00fcm\u00fc\u015fay","intro_preview_txt":"","intro_preview_img":28365,"post_id_old":"","post_author":null,"post_subtitle":"K\u00fcbra G\u00fcm\u00fc\u015fay","post_preview_img_hide_on_single":true,"post_txt_old":"","post_pdf":null,"post_copyright":"ccl_default","translated_post":false,"translations":null,"post_copyright_individual":"","post_related_posts":[0,28518,28428],"related_posts_post":[28412]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28360\/revisions"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person\/28412"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28428"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/0"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"project","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project?post=28360"},{"taxonomy":"project_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project_type?post=28360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}