If Chomsky’s winning the debate over psycho- vs. socio-linguistics,

then I’d say it’s because the world is slowly but surely becoming a cultural, if not linguistic, unity, chocked to the gills with gadgets and thingamajigs and the materialistic culture that produces it, promotes it, and ultimately explains it away. Most languages tend to simplify over time, dropping dual number and sexual inflection and unnecessary tenses and aspects, opting for the simple analytic isolating style of Chinese, and increasingly, English. Nothing may seem more obvious than a S-V-O system in which subjects go around verbing the Hell out of objects, but that is merely convention, without any prior or inherent logic. Despite conscious efforts on the part of editors and schoolmarms to iron out the historical kinks, sentences in the passive voice, like this one, are still being written by educated speakers of the English language. Furthermore, if I have anything to do with it, they will continue to be, notwithstanding the green lines crawling through my text like geckos through my house here in Thailand. Vestiges of archaic speech remain in all languages. We like it that way. Even in the analytic no-tense no-nonsense Asian languages, the ages of speaker and person spoken to are in constant reference. I doubt that Romance languages will ever lose the gender of a noun needing modification, as if there were something intrinsically feminine about a coffeepot. Europeans are hung up on sex; Asians are hung up on age. No matter how many sentences you diagram, language and logic are not the same, and cultural magic will be lost when and if we all speak the same language, whether or not with different words. I prefer linguistic heterosis, hybrid vigor, languages mating and mutating through cultural necessity to create the cultural reality that will eventually explain it. I’m ready to get out of my rut and get into a groove. That’s the beauty of language. It allows you to do that.

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