Blog # 1

After reading both articles I concluded that language does affect culture, ethnicity and and Religion. It may not seem that obvious at first but it truly touches every single one of them. looking at this point deeply , I think that understanding the roots of each language can help us figure out many missing parts from history. the article by David Crystal mentioned that by studying the Indo-Europeans, who were originally the seminomadic population living in a steppe regions of Southern Russia, around 4000 BC, they found that these people used words like bride and in-laws which showed a patriarchal society where the bride belongs to the husband's family and another example was the fact that these people used words such as farmer and farm pets that showed they were living off farming and they were in agricultural production. Due to the fact that we have no access to communicate with these people drawing inferences such as the one mentioned, are the most reliable answers we can get and history has proved that these are reliable conclusions. Therefore it is essential to study languages because they help us to reach the type of information that cant be reached any other ways. but then the question is " what happens to the forgotten languages?" if what we know about different cultures and ethnicity and religions is hugely dependent on languages then I conclude that there are still many cultures that we dont know about and I believe the article by David Crystal should have focused more on the history of forgotten languages not the very well-known once such as Persian, Italian and such that are already studied and are well understood both culturally and ethnically. Also I think both articles greatly based on sociological approaches rather than anthropological, and I think if it was done in pure anthropological and or religion perspective it would have been much more helpful to understand the situation in the silk road.