Language

     I was sitting in Chinese class the other day and decided to entertain myself by taking apart my pen and watching how the ink moved as I tipped the pen back and forth. As I stared at the liquid that would one day end up on paper as characters representing sounds and ideas I realized that the majority of what I was experiencing then was made by humans. The flags representing areas claimed BY HUMANS, the language FOR HUMANS, the lesson I was sitting through was entirely based on HUMAN discoveries. Later I took a walk and noticed a robin with a broken wing and thought about how it would not receive any medical attention but if it were a human it would get every bit of attention it would ask for.
    On my walk I was thinking about my explanation on an essay. In this essay I went a bit off topic and went on and on about how babies acquire language. Babies make sounds found in every language but after a while the people around the baby will encourage the sounds they recognize as part of their own language. Soon the baby will forget all the other sounds it used to produce and be able to string the encouraged sounds together into words and then sentences.
     What are letters? I think letters are just characters that represent sounds that we string together into words. What are words? Words (to me) are just things to string together to communicate an idea and try to make other people understand. Sentences? More complex ways of stringing together our words. Grammar? Ways to regulate how we form those sentences. Punctuation? Those are just ways to show the pauses we make and show the emotion we usually communicate through our facial expressions and other body languages. What about those languages that use entire characters to represent words? Just another way to communicate the same idea.
     Why should it matter if the word "moon" looks like "maan" or like 月? It all is the same thing just different ways of showing it. How sad is it that we discourage future polyglots at first? We discourage learning another language (most of the time) until the child learns a language we recognize and then later in life we tell the child that becoming multilingual is an important part of becoming a world citizen.
     Young children are able to learn languages much more easily than adults or even some of my peers (maybe among my peers its a lack of effort to learn). I believe that we should encourage young children to learn different languages so that we can better the world and their future.
     Also we are so intolerant of people who are different than us. Who cares if you believe a different religion or speak a different language? It shouldn't matter what color skin or hair you have, what color eyes you have or the way your teeth look. Why does it matter if you are different? Being different is what makes everyone important! We all bring something special to this world and we should celebrate that. We should celebrate ourselves and others, we need to try new things and love the world's humans for who they are.
     I celebrate myself by not letting anyone change me into something I don't want to be or know I'm not. I celebrate others by not trying to push my ideas or beliefs onto them and letting them be their own person.
    How do you celebrate yourself? Let me know in the comments.