<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - linguistics]]> 10 <![CDATA[Babel and the nation]]> The curse of Babel – as Joan-Lluís Lluís reminds us in a magnificent essay, Balla amb Babel– is based on the mistake of supposing that linguistic variety is a divine curse, a punishment, when, in fact, it is quite the opposite: a gift from God, or from a Humanity that enriches itself when it addresses the problem of communication and memory and personal and collective knowledge from thousands of different perspectives.It was the monolingualism of the biblical myth that led to the idea of building the tower. A single language means a single way of understanding the world, a single narrative, a single culture, a single authority. And it is precisely then that the imperial project appears. We live, not in the ruins of the tower, but in the continuous project of building new ones and eliminating the other thousands of ways of representing life and the world. Call it a tower or a nation-state. Call it whatever you want. Each language deposits not only grammatical categories, but metaphors, classifications of nature, conceptions of time and forms of courtesy, relationships between the individual and the community. It is the linguistic uniformization of the planet that makes it a more violent and uninhabitable place. It is the desire to erase languages that leads to the desire to erase the people who speak them and who still insist on wanting to speak them and pass them on to their children. J.M. Coetzee says that while we kill animals we will kill people, and that slaughterhouses are the antechambers of mass exterminations among humans. It is not slaughterhouses, however, but linguicides. Policies and attitudes of cultural assimilation that lead to linguistic marginalization are the antechamber of genocides. This is historically documented: the examples of this assertion are innumerable. There are no superior languages to others; there are no languages that fail to express love and knowledge and abstractions.Each language could offer us a redemptive, winning concept, an illumination of meaning that we lose forever. Because just as Greek shed light on the concepts that still feed a large part of our philosophy; Latin, the legal categories; medieval Arabic, scientific vocabulary, and now English gives us technological language, the other languages of the world could make their contribution, if we do not let them die in ignorance and silence.

]]> <![CDATA[Why do we say 'tenc que' if we should say 'he de'?]]>

There are verses that go in one ear and out the other. And there are those that, on any given day, make you stop. The other day, stuck in one of the usual traffic jams on the Mallorcan motorways, I noticed a line from Tobogan, by Zoo: “He had to work it out”. I noticed it because the same group, in Vull, sings: “If someone has to cry, let them cry”. It’s not that the line grated on me, nor was it (obviously!) the first time I had heard it. However, it made me think about the hesitation that still exists today in one of the most emblematic constructions of syntactic grammar.

]]> <![CDATA[The Pla de Mallorca region reclaims its forests: "We have focused our attention on the Serra and have forgotten this natural vegetation"]]>

The Pla de Mallorca is full of fragmented wooded areas scattered across the territory in a mosaic pattern, but historically "we have focused our attention on the Serra and other emblematic areas and have forgotten this natural vegetation that we need to recover," says the biologist and author of the book. Forests in the interior of Mallorca, Nature and CultureBiel Vicens. With this work – which he will present this Friday at 7:30 p.m. in the Sineu Town Hall auditorium – he aims to break with the "comparative injustice" that exists in relation to these wooded areas, little known despite their high value. In this regard, he exemplifies that in areas like the Serra de Tramuntana mountain range, there are many protected lands that are even publicly owned. In contrast, he denounces that "publicly owned forests do not exist in the Pla, with the sole exception of the municipality of Lloret." Therefore, he asks the town councils and the Consell de Mallorca (Island Council of Mallorca) to acquire forests and pay attention to them, since they are true lungs of biodiversity. In addition to highlighting the wooded areas in the Pla, Vicens also wants to explain the current importance of the area's forest ecosystems. "Today we know that agroforestry mosaics, like those that have barely survived until now, are capable of providing more ecosystem services than other, more extensive and homogeneous landscapes. Science highlights the benefits of natural vegetation environments for agricultural systems: protection against soil loss, protection against the elements, natural pollination, improved water infiltration and storage, among others," he explains.

]]> <![CDATA[The home language]]> All the linguistic aggression that occurs anywhere in the Catalan-speaking territories demonstrates once again how little power they want us to have in our own country. The situation always plays out in the same way: a Spanish speaker, faced with the normality of a Catalan speaker wanting to communicate in Catalan—and all this in Catalan-speaking territories—refuses to understand anything, shuts down completely, and says they have no obligation to learn Catalan, even if they want to run a business or practice medicine.

]]> <![CDATA[Who decides what constitutes speaking well?]]>

"But is this correct?" is one of the most common questions philologists hear. It's often accompanied by a cautious gesture, as if language were a treacherous terrain where one must move carefully to avoid "committing a barbarism." Behind this uncertainty lies a widespread idea: that there is someone, a kind of invisible authority, who knows exactly what "speaking correctly" means.

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