Gullah Geechee: What's in a language?

Kindle

What’s Italian but broken Latin, what’s Spanish but broken Latin, what’s French but broken Latin; so when you say Gullah Geechee is but broken language, you maybe talking about the next development of the west; started three centuries ago, as the Germans overtaking Europe from the Romans with a single but steady and long move. If Romans have had a powerful institution like the modern Academies of languages, we would haven’t evolved to our actual languages; like our mothers and family correcting our insistence in speak the way we do, as the best way to express our singularity. 

The only problem is that those languages reached maturity with their literature, while we persist in verbality; but that’s what’s in a language, and that’s what’s in a written literature, opposed to the spoken tradition. Oral tradition is a referential tool to guide the behavior and reflect about it, no to understand the world; that’s what literature do, setting the structure of the phrase, and linking everything (cosmos) in a drama.

Kindle

There’s still the undeniable fact of how logic is born, not from mathematics but from grammar, when Aristotle organized the relationship and functional links between subject and predicate. Not for nothing the old philosophers were called grammarians over properly philosophers, rather than mathematicians; but all the modern philosophers that leaded to the distortion of logic were magnificent mathematicians, not grammarians.

From Pythagoras postulating his intuition as a fact, the Plato that doesn’t dared to question it, to Descartes; from this late to Kant and Hegel, from this one to Heidegger understanding that something was wrong on all this. The total evolution of the west history of though is full of mathematicians, unable to understand reality in its own complexity; because rather than the flexibility of literature and arts in its reflection of reality as an object, they just tend to force its determination.

Kindle

It doesn’t matter anyway, all those languages struggled through centuries from their first attempts to maturity; but it may be about time for this ultimate transformation, organizing the understanding the world as a cosmos. Not even that first attempt of the Gullah Bible is enough or still good, on this sense of hermeneutical tools; because it doesn’t surpass that same insufficiency of the storytelling, as just a tradition with moral reference; not an actual tool to rationalize the world, which is what hermeneutics is about.

The bible is not a step, as neither the manuals of grammar, because they’re just a conventional interpretation; that working as the same effort of any conventional Academy, struggles to reflect the reality in its complex functions. As a reflection of life, languages are alive themselves, and Gullah Geechee need to breath by its own; that’s what Adam did naming the things, to give them a specifical human function, through the hermeneutical effort of understand the world as human.

That’s then what Gullah Geechee is called to be, as the last step of the struggling west to understand its own nature; a comprehension already distorted by the critical mas of its conventions, leading to the distortion of logic because this insufficiency. And that’s then what’s in a literature, as the ultimate organization of a language, the maturity of an entire world; that can this way rearrange new conventions as a new way of life, that gives humanity the new spaces it needs for rest and grow.

 All this is important for something more than its mere postulation, which refers only to political and fairness; this is important because the problem with Gullah Geechee is not just a problem of identity (political) or fairness. It solves the ontological contradiction of the whole humanity, and that’s more important than even the unfairness of history; that’s what’s in a language, and in its literature as its stage of maturity and sufficiency, not just the dignity of some people but the live of the world.