Internal dialogue.

Through life, and college, I've found languages fascinating. I've studied many, but the highlight, I feel, was taking a few linguistics courses my senior year at Rutgers. I had a great professor, Susan Schweitzer. She really gave me the tools I needed to change and expand the way I thought about language.

Language is a fascinating thing. Language, in many ways, is contrived. There's no direct link between spoken words and their meanings; these are arbitrarily links that need to be learned. Think also of made up words, or "standardized" dialects of a language. When you really think about, though, we often act as if a word concretely fixes - no, captures - an idea. It's arbitrariness makes it external, but we internalize it completely. We judge others often entirely based on their accents.

Living in Jersey, I see it all the time. Just by the way we speak (never mind everything else culturally) we should be two (or three!) completely different states. Then, think of the stereotypes associated with people who use "British," "Southern," or "Canadian" accents.

Old Avestan, a language in the Indo-Iranian language family and a cousin to both Old Persian and Vedic Sanskrit, provides a great example. When you compare the phonology of Old Avestan and Vedic Sanskrit, a clear distinction emerges. Old Avestan's consonants appear in "normal" and "fricated" forms. Vedic Sanskrit's consonants appear in "unaspirated" and "aspirated" forms. Actually, the two languages were so close that many texts could be "translated" into the other by extremely simple rules.

(Of course, I haven't cited anything, so please don't take this concretely; I'm merely using this as one of a number of examples as a basis for an opinion.)

When you look at the deities of the Avestan texts and the Vedic texts, and then look at what happens to the cults over time afterwards, it seems as though the speakers of each could've been from the same community at some point. After diverging (or, indeed, diverging because of it), each group praises the opposing deities. The Avestan-speakers praise the ahura-s, as opposed to the hura-s, and the Sanskrit-speakers praise the sura-s, as opposed to the asura-s. (One rule for transliteration between the two is a predictable switching of /h/ for /s/.

Some other food for thought is that "Sanskrit" means "polished." If this was the original meaning (not attributed later on by the priestly class), then perhaps the Sanskrit-speakers were just pronouncing things differently from the Avestan-speakers, in a more "polished" (at least to them) way, and then eventually they went their separate ways. Of course, this is all unsubstantiated, and just the musing of my mind. Honestly, I don't think we could prove any of this at all anyway. I think you had to be there, so you can't really pick a side.

Really though, think about it. You can see how Latin and Italian diverge, and then eventually how other romance languages come about. You can see it with the Algonquin and Odawa North American Aboriginal peoples, who spoke almost the same language and were two distinct, separate communities.

Lets bring this to modern times. When you call up Google's free 411 service (1-800-goog-411), a computer picks up what you say and attempts to interpret this. The technological challenge in this (aside from having to go through crappy quality phone signals) is that everyone speaks differently, so it's difficult to create a system that can differentiate this stuff. Actually, they interviewed a lot of people to do the "operator" messages for phones back in the day, and they went with the sort of "Standardized" American pronunciation, so everyone would be able to understand them.

Language is something that we so completely internalize that it's integral to us. I don't really think in "words" so much, though many people I know claim they think in complete sentences, like a commentary in their heads. We even acknowledge this, as evidenced by the adage that one truly knows a language when they can dream in it.

Something else that's really important: no language is inherently any better or worse than any other language. Really, it's a matter of opinion, which is usually based on the fact that they learned their preferred language first, or that there's a specific reason why they learned it.

I really believe that people die because of language. Language-based prejudice goes beyond all other prejudices, I believe. Languages can bring people of many different faiths and cultures, as well as "races" together. Look at Arabic, the language of Islam and Coptic Christianity, of "Arabs" and "Africans," and of people from all different backgrounds. And, in a foreign land, it's much easier to group with people who speak the same language as you, or one that's close. Even if, as many Indian-Americans and Pakistani-Americans can attest to, your homelands are on opposite ends of wars. Language can bridge gaps. It can also create them.

Just remember, language is no absolute. Take a look at polyglots. If they know a word in two languages, and they think of it, it's not necessarily in the language they learned first, or even in the one they know better. There's a lot of linguistic and psychological theory behind that. So think twice before you insult someone else based on how they speak, or if you yourself are insulted. Remember the bigger picture.