The power of language

1. What does the image, and the story, suggest about the benefits of everyone speaking the same language? What are the drawbacks?

        If everyone speaks the same language, we can all understand each other and work together for a better world. By the other hand, it wouldn’t be good to speak the same language because we would lack of ethnical identity and we would all have basically the same pas and culture.

2. What does the story suggest about the social functions of language?

Language is used to communicate with each other. If we can understand our peers, we can work together for the same objective.

3. What are some other early stories that deal with the origins or evolution of language? What do these stories suggest about the power of language?

Mesoamerica: The Aztecs told the story of CoxCox (a man) and Xochiquetzal (a woman) survived the horrors of the earth by floating on a bark. Then, after they had their first children on land, they found out these were unable to speak. Such feature changed when a dove landed upon their heads, granting each one with a different language.

Brazil: The Ticuna people from the Upper Amazon tell the story that everyone was  one united in a single tribe, all speaking the same language, until two hummingbird eggs were eaten (the legend doesn't say whom). After this event, the tribe split into different groups and dispersed across the globe.

Africa: The Bantu people from East Africa tell the story of a severe famine that struck the first people of the world (who spoke the same language at the beginning). This drove everyone to madness, causing them to wander in all sorts of directions, mumbling strange words not know by men before.

All of these stories suggest that language is the main tool needed to build an organized society and without it we wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other and work together.