Every now and again I find myself asking, or being asked, why biodiversity is so important. Why should we care whether some faraway, unphotogenic species of frog will live to see another year? I have attempted answering this question in the TiME newsletter, using several angles: suggesting that humans, animals, and plants are “citizens” of the same environment; that the interdependency of human-wildlife relations often unfolds in unpredictable ways, the importance of the natural world to culture, and that nature improves our mental and physical health. Here I want to offer another perspective on the importance of biodiversity, drawing from my “day job,” linguistics.
Differentiating
Many languages across the world differentiate between animate and inanimate beings; the difference between who and what is one prominent example. The first question indicates that the subject is an animate being; the second question asks what kind of object the subject is.
There are many types of grammatical animacy markers; German, for example, designates one verb for eating when humans do it (essen) and another for when animals do it (fressen). These verbs differentiate one of the most natural bodily functions between a “dignified,” human, and often social act, and an animalistic, thoughtless process, drawing a line between the human body and the animal body.
The idea that language shapes our thoughts is popular, but many linguists today do not take it to be true in the superficial sense: that is, speaking a language that encodes animals as different than people probably does not prime you to treat animals as lesser beings. However, it is probably true that languages encode something deeply cultural when they treat animals in one way or another; consider the society that refers to ships as “she,” treating them as living beings, while not extending the same courtesy to animals. But this goes far deeper. Observing grammar and etymologies can reveal something about the way cultures view animals, and the relationship between them and the human world. In the words of the influential philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “a whole mythology is deposited in our language.”
Mythologizing
What is a bear? Literally, the origin of the word and its cognates in other Germanic languages (i.e., words with a common ancestor) is “the brown one,” and it is often believed to have derived from a taboo on naming the animal directly — perhaps out of fear that speaking the name out loud would cause the predator to appear. In Slavic languages, the same original taboo is suspected, but the name medved and its variants across Slavic tongues mean “honey-eater.” When you say “bear,” then, you use one of the world’s oldest euphemisms, and echo a primal fear — and awe — of an animal treated almost like a god: do not speak its name.
Etymologies like this are fun anecdotes, but they also tell us something about ourselves: about what our culture used to believe, how it viewed the human-nature relationship, and how it developed. In other words, language stores our mythology, which tells us who we are. Each word and grammatical rule is a myth kept alive in the form of vowels, consonants, and syntax. Historical linguists excavate long-lost words by backtracking cognates, and reconstruct ancient words that existed long before script could immortalize them. Tracing words allows us to learn who our ancestors were, how they lived, and how cultures we know today have formed.
Say the word séhaul. It means “sun” in a language we now call Proto Indo-European, spoken between 5,000 and 8,000 years ago. Hold it on your tongue. You are touching, tasting a reconstruction of an ancient word made up of fossils. You already know some of its descendants (sun in English, sol in Spanish, svàr in Sanskrit), and now you can hold their forefather. Imagine holding a hummingbird in one hand and touching a reconstructed T-Rex, made of actual fossils, in the other. This is the awe we should feel upon uttering séhaul.
Living
Potawatomi is an endangered language in North America, spoken in today’s northern Wisconsin. There are presumed to be no more native speakers of the language, and soon — if it is not the case already — no one will be truly fluent in Potawatomi. If that happens, we will lose a language that, unlike the languages mentioned so far, does not classify nouns into genders or differentiates humans from animals. Instead, Potawatomi divides nouns into animate and inanimate. Verbs describe things that English denotes with nouns: it has verbs for “to be a mountain,” and “to be a Saturday.” Robin Wall Kimmerer, a descendant of the Potawatomi people who has attempted to learn the language, describes her frustration and then her sudden epiphany in the face of the word wiikwegama, “to be a bay”:
It’s all wrong. A bay is most definitely a person, place, or thing—a noun and not a verb. […] And then I swear I heard the zap of synapses firing. An electric current sizzled down my arm and through my finger, and practically scorched the page where that one word lay. In that moment, I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore, and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikegama—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods, this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.
—Kimmerer, 2015
A language is a mirror of the culture and the mind. The fact that Potawatomi exists means that it is possible for humans everywhere to conceive of times, bays and mountains as an act of being, a moment, a choice, a life. We are capable of understanding them differently, and therefore of changing the relationship between humanity and nature.
Being
Just like the evolution of species, languages develop by small mutations and variations, which branch out over time to become significant, easily recognized differences. Each language preserves in its grammar, like an encapsulated DNA, a singular expression of what it means to be human, to conceptualize, offering a unique way of slicing an indiscernible mass of reality into categories. If Potawatomi becomes extinct, we will lose the irreplaceable knowledge of a people who understand bays to be an act of being. Each extinct language is one configuration of the human mind that we may never understand about ourselves and a piece of history we can never uncover.
A species, likewise, is a singular expression of what it means to be alive, a unique instance of life, of matter waking up and reacting to its environment. Each form is a window into life itself, into one possible answer to the question what it is to be. Biodiversity is life, and if that is not worth fighting for, I do not know what is.
Author: Noga Syon
Editor: Liat Radcliffe Ross
Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Potawatomi.” Encyclopedia Britannica, July 25, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Potawatomi.
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Kimmerer, Robin Rose. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. London: Penguin, 2015.
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