Language: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 7

In this room

Follow the subject sideways.

Cards are connected by subject and by mood. Move through the complete sequence below, or cross into a neighbouring part of the archive.

33Drive

37Stillness

127Wonder

Q1930

WonderLanguage

Roughly two dozen wooden objects bearing rongorongo glyphs survive from Rapa Nui, but no proposed decipherment has won scholarly acceptance and the texts remain unread.

The surviving lines carry compact figures—human, animal, plantlike and geometric—often arranged in a reverse direction when the tablet is turned. Their makers left no bilingual key, and the knowledge needed to read them did not survive the violence, disease and social rupture that transformed Rapa Nui in the nineteenth century. Claims of a solution arrive regularly; evidence has not yet made one persuasive. The silence belongs not to the objects, but to the historical conditions that severed text from reader.

RongorongoRead card

Q1931

StillnessLanguage

Vedic recitation preserves words, pitch accents and pronunciation, using patterned sequences that recombine words and word-pairs to detect and resist errors in oral transmission.

A written transcript can record a sentence while losing how each syllable rises, falls or joins the next. Vedic teachers preserve those dimensions through exact imitation and recitation patterns that reorder words into controlled combinations, making a mistake easier to expose. The discipline demands years because the archive is distributed across trained bodies rather than stored in one object. Its precision shows oral memory not as the absence of technology, but as a technology refined around breath, repetition and mutual correction.

Vedic chantRead card

Q1932

WonderLanguage

Across South and Southeast Asia, scribes prepared palm leaves as pages, writing or incising texts before stringing the narrow folios between protective boards.

Palm-leaf manuscripts carried literature, ritual, law, astronomy and medicine in many languages and scripts across a vast region. Their long, narrow format reflects the material itself; holes and cord kept separate leaves in sequence, while boards guarded the bundle. Heat, insects and humidity made periodic recopying part of preservation, so survival depended on active readership rather than passive storage. Today's digitisation protects access, but the page still bears the shape of a plant and the labour of a hand.

Palm-leaf manuscriptRead card

Q1933

DriveLanguage

Beginning with Hawaiian-medium preschools in 1984 and public immersion schooling in 1987, community-led education rebuilt a path for ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi from early childhood to university.

By the late twentieth century, generations of English-dominant schooling had pushed Hawaiian out of many homes and classrooms. Families and educators answered by building Pūnana Leo preschools, then fighting for public immersion pathways that could continue through secondary and higher education. Children were not asked merely to study the language; they learned mathematics, science and daily life through it. Revitalisation became durable when Hawaiian was allowed to carry a whole future, not just describe a treasured past.

Hawaiian languageRead card

Q1934

StillnessLanguage

Ainu is critically endangered, yet community classes, instructor training, family programmes and museum-based teaching are creating new settings in which it can be spoken and heard.

Assimilation policies and discrimination interrupted the everyday transmission of Ainu across generations in Japan. Revitalisation now takes several forms at once: beginner and advanced courses, new teaching materials, training for instructors, parent-child learning and public programmes led by Ainu knowledge holders. A museum can preserve recordings and objects, but a language needs situations in which one person addresses another. The decisive unit of survival is not the word in a catalogue; it is the relationship that gives someone reason to say it.

Ainu languageRead card

Q1935

DriveLanguage

Since 1989, Kaurna people and collaborating linguists have reclaimed the Adelaide Plains language from community knowledge and nineteenth-century records for teaching and public use.

German missionaries wrote down substantial Kaurna vocabulary and grammar in the 1840s, even as colonisation was breaking the conditions for transmission on the Adelaide Plains. More than a century later, Kaurna leaders used those records as tools—not authorities—to reconstruct pronunciation, create new terms and place the language in welcomes, songs, education and signage. Reclamation does not pretend the rupture never happened. It makes an ethical reversal: paper gathered under colonial power now serves living Kaurna decisions.

Kaurna languageRead card

Q1952

StillnessArt

Arabic calligraphers exploit the script's connected right-to-left forms—stretching, compressing and arranging letters—while controlling line through a cut reed qalam.

The Arabic alphabet's twenty-eight letters change form as they join, giving the calligrapher a system in which proportion and movement can operate inside language. Traditional practice begins with material intelligence: the angle of a cut reed, soot-based ink, prepared paper and a hand trained to repeat a stroke until it carries ease. The same principles have travelled into stone, metal, textiles, type and calligraffiti. Legibility and beauty do not sit on opposite sides; the art keeps negotiating the exact distance between them.

Arabic calligraphyRead card