English as a 2nd Language

I grew up as a native English speaker. It’s my first language. Mostly, its my only language. I sort of know Spanish, but to a native speaker I usually say “Mi Espanyol es mas o menos como un nino de dos anos.“ And that’s after living in central Mexico for seven years. I am a slow learner, I guess.

At 70 years old I always say, “I am still learning English.” And that’s no joke. I am continuously coming upon new words I do not know, and, as far as I know, I have never even heard them before. Maybe I have heard them or read them and just skipped over them because I felt like I knew, through the context, what those words meant enough not to bother remembering them or looking it up in the dictionary.

Since I am now keeping a daily journal, I write new words down in my journal to try to integrate them into my language set. In a way, each new word added to your vocabulary, expands your conceptual world a little bit. Here are three recent ones for me

Lacuna plural noun: lacunae - an unfilled space or interval; a gap.

Gallimaufry - a confused jumble or medley of things.

Sibilant - making or characterized by a hissing sound

I often look up words I already know just to deepen my understanding of the word - where it came from, what its etymology is, the various ways it can be used, etc. Often the simplest words carry an incredible amount of weight and flexibility for their size as the above video demonstrates.

Now that I am trying to write regularly, I guess that is encouraging me to think about language a great deal more. I have always had a stand-offish relationship to language because it is not a very good surrogate for direct experience. It is always a translation of experience and in translation much is lost or even worse, twisted.

But, like art making, it offers quite a complex range of expressions, and you can use it much the same way. So, I like that part.

It is just all the damage that can be tracked back directly to language usage that I find disturbing. How it can be used in so many nefarious and insidious ways and how vulnerable and susceptible we all are to its use and impact on us. This seems especially true under our current conditions.

The History of Language as a Technology

The history of language as a technology is very fascinating. Written language evolved as a transformative information technology in both the East and West and Mesoamerica, though they followed distinct trajectories from pictograms to their modern forms. While Western systems prioritized phonetic abstraction (the alphabet), Eastern systems—primarily Chinese—maintained a semantic-visual continuity (logography).

1. Origins and Early Purpose (3500 BC – 1200 BC)

Writing in both regions emerged as a technology for state management and accounting rather than literature.

• The West (Mesopotamia): The earliest writing, Cuneiform (c. 3200 BC), evolved from 3D clay tokens used to track agricultural goods. Over 1,000 years, it transitioned from counting to representing speech.

• The East (China): Chinese characters appeared independently (c. 1200 BC) in the Yellow River valley. Early examples include Oracle Bones used for divination and prophecy, reflecting a technology of ritual and power rather than just accounting.

2. Divergent Technological Paths

The primary difference lies in how each region handled the “efficiency” of signs.

• The West: Towards Abstraction (The Alphabet). Western scribes simplified pictograms into phonetic markers. By 1800 BC, Semitic workers in the Sinai developed Proto-Sinaitic, the first abjad (consonantal alphabet), which stripped away meaning to focus purely on sound. The Greeks later refined this by adding vowels (c. 800 BC), creating a highly efficient 20–30 character system that could record any spoken word.

• The East: Towards Complexity (Logography). In contrast, the East Asian tradition made pictograms more complex rather than simplifying them. Chinese characters evolved as logograms, where each symbol represents a word or morpheme. This technology remained stable for over 3,000 years, allowing people who spoke different dialects to communicate through a shared written medium

Below is a pretty interesting look at the evolution of language.