A Poem and Article about Language

Another poem that my friend posted the other day and this time the subject is language-words, thoughts, sounds, information. There was an article in the New York Times about languages and how New York City has probably the most diverse and greatest amount of languages in one area: "It's the capital of language density in the world." Many of these oral languages are spoken by immigrants and are endangered. Immigrants who came to New York are now the only ones to carry their culture, since their native countries have also evolved to forget dialects spoken fifty or more years ago. A linguistic article I came upon while searching for a photo to go with this post.


Losing a Language- W.S.  Merwin

A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old still remember something that they could say

but they know now that such things are no longer believed
and the young have fewer words

many of the things the words were about
no longer exist

the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree
the verb for I

the children will not repeat
the phrases their parents speak

somebody has persuaded them
that it is better to say everything differently

so that they can be admired somewhere
farther and farther away

where nothing that is here is known
we have little to say to each other

we are wrong and dark
in the eyes of the new owners

the radio is incomprehensible
the day is glass

when there is a voice at the door it is foreign
everywhere instead of a name that is a lie

nobody has seen it happening
nobody remembers

this is what the words were made
to prophesy

here are the extinct feathers
here is the rain we saw