Anna Davtyan | Language through Lessons

Photo by Nazik Armenakyan

The teacher is always the person who needs to be forgiven for temporariness. I thought of this when I was already a teacher. When I was teaching my young students not a specific profession but was explaining the state of things. In a word there is the state of things, in a book there is the state of things. Literature, therefore, is the state of things. From a sign to context and the hypertext.

There is the English word scope, that when you Google translate it, it translates into Armenian as a “circle,” but the scope includes many things in one circle, it’s the mass not of form, of gauges, but of the quantitative inclusiveness. What kind of scope can literature have? Any literature. It is impossible to present, and it is also impossible to take in. It is even impossible to imagine. And so, to make more particles of scope to be known, in parallel to explaining its peaks, I also had to explain the littlest nuances. And by initiating this work of breakfasts, I will try to make known some peaks and nuances of that scope throughout the length of this book, which include my experience of teaching and the laboratory of writing, and can be helpful to readers, teachers, students, and those who try to write.

Literature is a scope that includes the nuance of each element of itself and combines their altogetherness: its quantitiveness also unreachably undistinguishable.

I was a teacher that, apart from basics, explained nuances a lot. Sometimes I, myself, would become a nuance for them. It could even be a smile looking into a pair of eyes – right on time, for someone who otherwise would think of themselves as invisible. I hope I did not have the tiredness of missing someone’s obvious need. Because a teacher is also the one who gets tired. (S)he also gets tired of giving explanations of the things other teachers have said. For the notions of other teachers. And because the most thrown around thing is the opinion (it doesn’t recognize a scope), the teenager students might say, “but that’s your opinion,” as if having learned that an opinion is something that you can simply have and scatter around, because in this world, each person gets a huge military pile of opinions, and an opinion can be waved as a flag. Often times, they were the opinions of their teachers which were hard to understand from where they were assuming things. As if there were bases of opinions from which you can obtain and use some with metal pourpan.

For my students, I always opened up the Armenian verbs “to form” and “to design” that are used with the word “opinion;” that the opinion is something that gets a form, forms, becomes, by forging the material experienced externally in the internal factories. I might have even said to them sharply and directly, “you cannot have an opinion,” or “that’s not your opinion,” softening my sharpness with the context of the moment or with a gesture or tone. Sometimes they would be astonished by hearing such a sabering from me. But to teach means also to saber. (is there anything that doesn’t mean to teach?)

But to teach, first of all, means to teach to think. Of course, this is already an old and hackneyed idea, which, for already a while, has been considered a new one. It is said as if everyone knows, and knows perfectly, how to do that. If we are talking about a long period of time – a year, years, it is always possible to find ways, to specify approaches, to do things slower and smoother. Ministries of Education always are ready to load you with benchmarks. Which they themselves have just learned. As if the Ministry of Education should have been about education. While it is about benches and marks.

But the teenage student would be my student for one month, only eight classes if attended them all. After a month we might never ever meet again. My time was not big. Whereas, the students were feeling constrained with things that more and more would take away from them the means of thinking and time. I had to act fast. The tools had to be arranged on the table with white tablecloth beforehand. And they, with all the other things, had also to be sharp, so they would be able to be used in students’ hands as well. In a way that it would mean not to take someone’s opinion and use, but really would mean to think, to reach to a point based on one’s own feelings. What could mean to teach to think? In just a month.

This is what I would do. In the very beginning. What is for the very beginning, I had thought, what can be a non-slip soil under their (our) feet? What is thinkable? Feelable. From what part of feeling one can squeeze knowledge. Is feeling a place? But they are completely tangled. It’s impossible to rely on their stormy age of feelings. It’s extremely easy to hurt them. One should give them a spot to stand on. From where they would depart to their senses. Only after that they would think what they had felt. But on what’s trustworthiness to rely on? On what they can rely on themselves, without any help, if I think that there is something like that? There is, there is, just find it!
And I, myself, would rely on Orwell… On the first lesson. I would lean them on that hard lump of soil, whose non-metaphorical first meaning I consider the most reliable, leanable place in the world. If there is a hard lump of soil, then there is everything.

So, in 1984, I do not remember at all where exactly, at what moment, regarding what, because I have problems with memory, but there is an idea that whatever happens, whatever occurs, however they make you blind, control you, rule you, tyrannize you, even if you get lost in dystopic novel/life’s zones, it’s always possible to rely on fundamental values. When you get lost, rely on fundamental values! Only to adults this can seem: “Ah, I was waiting for something more interesting.”

For the adults forged in the bustle and hustle of NGO and media fields, who spin these words like beads wallowing through their fingers, these are agenda words, which also bring money. Though, except them, there are a lot of adults who do not know what it particularly means. That’s how strenuous life is. Also, the life of our teachers. And students also do not know what that means. Maybe even because of teachers’ strenuous lives, which is an unbearably painful thing. One forgets even to live out of tiredness.

But for teenagers these really were ways out. They would think like that for the first time. Before that they had felt, knew what is good and bad, they felt. But they hadn’t felt the lump of the soil under their feet that helps to have their own ideas inside their heads.

I would ask them to start. To list what would be an important thing for a person to be able to live with another person. What could be called fundamental value, like, a term that they heard a lot on TV or on social media but which we can change and name ‘a yellow pear,’ for example, with which it is possible to exchange with other people. Which one can be the foremost and the most fundamental one? What do they have, in the first place, that was given to them for nothing, but we have the strongest urge to keep it.

They would start to list options, among them, in a very funny way, the right of opinion on the first place. No surprise, they are young. If youngsters don’t have an opinion, even someone else’s, they won’t form a self. Finally, after a lot of hints, a lot of tormenting, a lot of wandering around, from the mouth of one of them would slip the frightened ‘life,’ ‘living.’ This would always come like life itself. They would already feel; when saying it they would already feel that they understood. And I would always mark and celebrate the found answer. Then I would suggest arranging the other values according to their tastes. Someone liked to put love next, another one justice, the other one would go with freedom, the next with family, patriotism, friendship, etc.

There is already a space to stand with one foot, there is one little lifebuoy, there is a catching hook, it’s possible to go deeper.

“And now a question,” I would say, “I am your teacher, I enter the classroom and say, ‘From now on you cannot wear red or both girls and boys can’t wear earrings.’ (I, myself, am wearing red and have my earrings on.) What should you do?” In the answers students would mostly mention that in the school that’s exactly what their teachers do, they are walking registers and pointers of no-no’s. But the question would hang in the air: what should you do? That they should obey was also in the list of their answers. A second step was needed. The second or the next following step of thinking. I would teach them to always ask the question ‘Why?’ Always ask “Why?”! All the questions are important: what, how, when, where, how much, etc. but when you are commanding orders, always have the answer to the question “Why?” Students, always have the question “Why?”! To find the motive, the reason, the intention. The motive to lean on the above found lump of soil. Is the answer to that question an exchangeable yellow pear? Or does it only serve the one ordering as a pear, money, rule, control and the love of evil. I would tell them, “Ask the question ‘why?’ and to the answer of that also ask the question ‘why?’ and to the answer to that question again ask ‘why?’ to an extent when you will reach to the question of the questions. If the person speaking to you has thought thoroughly and whatever they want is reliable on values, then they will only stop before the question of the questions, because no one has the answer to that question. Thus, what is the question of the questions?” I would ask. They would hunt high and low, stumble here and there, I would hint, they would make jokes, we would laugh, I would hint, they would come closer, then get far, I would hint, finally, one of them, frightened, half-winged, half-tongued: “the purpose of life?” “Yes!” We would get happy. Or, which is the same thing, in the form of a question: from where the life came? The purpose of life and from where life originated are the two sides of the same coin. I would say, “If the one talking to you isn’t able to answer to this question that, you know, is forgivable.” They would laugh. “In the world a lot of people answered and continue to answer to that question, but God knows. I don’t even know what I, myself, think: is there a God or no, but I don’t have an answer to that question. I don’t know from where life came. But if before that the answers to your “Why?” questions satisfied you, if I based them on the values of pears, if I made my subjective opinion objective for you, if my motive is a good one, a kind one, is not an incomplete and an opposing one, is not money or ruling or control, and is also not stupidity, then you can one by one pass by the following spirals of thinking, that is comparably easy.”

With these two tools: with relying on fundamental values and discovering the motive by asking the question “Why?” the students were able to think about a lot of things. These tools had formed in my head only while teaching. I had found these thanks to my students. This was only a method and looking for exhaustive answers for how the fundamental values are defined, what is life, what can be named as good or bad, which subjective is objective, etc. aren’t discussable here.

But I told all of this for my spot to stop at, under whose pear tree I will harbor: language. For a while I will tell my story through students. Then we will abandon them as the rule of temporariness is.

What is a language? “A way of communication, a way of expressing feelings, and other things,” they would answer. The question was too broad, I would narrow it down. “Let’s come from another place,” I would say, “what language can you use to write? What language can we use to write in this workshop?” Their main answer was: literary. And that’s where I would use what I had thought them, I would ask: “Why?” They would answer, “to keep the language immaculate.”
“Why to keep it immaculate?” I would continue the way I had taught them. This was already a weird question: why would you question immaculateness? How could our obsession with immaculateness, which is maybe beautiful, but unreflected, be typical for this country that passed through maculateness of thousands of years, when life was maculated, erased and rebuilt for so many times. I would not stop my thinking here, I would think about our strive for immaculateness, but not at the moment, not yet.

“So, why keep the language immaculate, guys?” “Because that’s what they teach us at school.” I, again, would say, “why do they teach it that way?” But from this part on it was always clear that the students are not responsible for the unthought and unanswered questions of their teachers.

We would move on.

I would change the direction. I would attack. With an assertive, almost imperative sentence I would say: “You can use any words: literary, colloquial, dialectal, professional, jargon, vernacular, layers of Classical and Middle Armenian, Western Armenian, Russianisms, English, words in any foreign languages, and, finally, cuss words!” Sometimes I would use the phrase ‘swear words’ when I would feel that the audience is less ready, but mostly I would try to use specifically the word cuss to leave another ‘why’ in their heads with the stream of adrenalin. And they would already know the game, they would ask me: why? And that was exactly what I had wanted. To grab it from the root.

And I would start all over again.
“What do you think, why did the language originate, guys?” For many years answering this question for thousands of young students, I only Googled it now, during my residency in Iowa, and it turned out, like in the cases of the origin of life and purpose, this one also doesn’t have a definitive answer.

In the footnote, in long pages, I cite Wikipedia from where the chosen passages are Google translated into Armenian and slightly edited, and I encourage you to read it before reading the continuation, so you will have more information and awareness.[1]

[1] Theories about the origin of language differ in regard to their basic assumptions about what language is.  Some theories are based on the idea that language is so complex that one cannot imagine it simply appearing from nothing in its final form, but that it must have evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among our pre-human ancestors. These theories can be called continuity-based theories. The opposite viewpoint is that language is such a unique human trait that it cannot be compared to anything found among non-humans and that it must therefore have appeared suddenly in the transition from pre-hominids to early man. Similarly, theories based on the generative view of language pioneered by Noam Chomsky see language mostly as an innate faculty that is largely genetically encoded, whereas functionalist theories see it as a system that is largely cultural, learned through social interaction.

Thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) have argued that language originated from emotions, while others like Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) have argued that languages originated from rational and logical thought. Twentieth century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) argued that philosophy is really the study of language itself.

Debates about the nature and origin of language go back to the ancient world. Greek philosophers such as Gorgias and Plato debated the relation between words, concepts and reality. Gorgias argued that language could represent neither the objective experience nor human experience, and that communication and truth were therefore impossible. Plato maintained that communication is possible because language represents ideas and concepts that exist independently of, and prior to, language.

Thinkers such as Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder argued that language had originated in the instinctive expression of emotions, and that it was originally closer to music and poetry than to the logical expression of rational thought. Rationalist philosophers such as Kant and René Descartes held the opposite view. Around the turn of the 20th century, thinkers began to wonder about the role of language in shaping our experiences of the world – asking whether language simply reflects the objective structure of the world, or whether it creates concepts that in turn impose structure on our experience of the objective world.

Another definition sees language as a formal system of signs governed by grammatical rules of combination to communicate meaning. This definition stresses that human languages can be described as closed structural systems consisting of rules that relate particular signs to particular meanings. This structuralist view of language was first introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, and his structuralism remains foundational for many approaches to language.

Yet another definition sees language as a system of communication that enables humans to exchange verbal or symbolic utterances. This definition stresses the social functions of language and the fact that humans use it to express themselves and to manipulate objects in their environment.

Communication systems used by other animals such as bees or apes are closed systems that consist of a finite, usually very limited, number of possible ideas that can be expressed. In contrast, human language is open-ended and productive, meaning that it allows humans to produce a vast range of utterances from a finite set of elements, and to create new words and sentences. This is possible because human language is based on a dual code, in which a finite number of elements which are meaningless in themselves (e.g. sounds, letters or gestures) can be combined to form an infinite number of larger units of meaning (words and sentences). However, one study has demonstrated that an Australian bird, the chestnut-crowned babbler, is capable of using the same acoustic elements in different arrangements to create two functionally distinct vocalizations.

However, while some animals may acquire large numbers of words and symbols, none have been able to learn as many different signs as are generally known by an average 4 year old human, nor have any acquired anything resembling the complex grammar of human language.

Stephen Anderson states that the age of spoken languages is estimated at 60,000 to 100,000 years.  Some scholars assume the development of primitive language-like systems (proto-language) as early as Homo habilis (2.3 million years ago) while others place the development of primitive symbolic communication only with Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago) or Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 million years ago).

In March 2024, researchers reported that the beginnings of human language began about 1.6 million years ago.

Researchers on the evolutionary origin of language generally find it plausible to suggest that language was invented only once, and that all modern spoken languages are thus in some way related, even if that relation can no longer be recovered.

Because language emerged in the early prehistory of man, before the existence of any written records, its early development has left no historical traces, and it is believed that no comparable processes can be observed today. Theories that stress continuity often look at animals to see if, for example, primates display any traits that can be seen as analogous to what pre-human language must have been like. Early human fossils can be inspected for traces of physical adaptation to language use or pre-linguistic forms of symbolic behaviour. Among the signs in human fossils that may suggest linguistic abilities are: the size of the brain relative to body mass, the presence of a larynx capable of advanced sound production and the nature of tools and other manufactured artifacts.

Chomsky is one prominent proponent of a discontinuity-based theory of human language origins. He suggests that for scholars interested in the nature of language, “talk about the evolution of the language capacity is beside the point.” Chomsky proposes that perhaps “some random mutation took place […] and it reorganized the brain, implanting a language organ in an otherwise primate brain.” Though cautioning against taking this story literally, Chomsky insists that “it may be closer to reality than many other fairy tales that are told about evolutionary processes, including language.”

The study of language, linguistics, has been developing into a science since the first grammatical descriptions of particular languages in India more than 2000 years ago, after the development of the Brahmi script.

Speaking is the default modality for language in all cultures. The production of spoken language depends on sophisticated capacities for controlling the lips, tongue and other components of the vocal apparatus, the ability to acoustically decode speech sounds, and the neurological apparatus required for acquiring and producing language. The study of the genetic bases for human language is at an early stage: the only gene that has definitely been implicated in language production is FOXP2, which may cause a kind of congenital language disorder if affected by mutations.

Languages express meaning by relating a sign form to a meaning, or its content. Sign forms must be something that can be perceived, for example, in sounds, images, or gestures, and then related to a specific meaning by social convention. Because the basic relation of meaning for most linguistic signs is based on social convention, linguistic signs can be considered arbitrary, in the sense that the convention is established socially and historically, rather than by means of a natural relation between a specific sign form and its meaning.

In The Descent of Man, naturalist Charles Darwin called this process “an instinctive tendency to acquire an art”.

Studies published in 2013 have indicated that unborn fetuses are capable of language acquisition to some degree. From birth, newborns respond more readily to human speech than to other sounds. Around one month of age, babies appear to be able to distinguish between different speech sounds. Around six months of age, a child will begin babbling, producing the speech sounds or handshapes of the languages used around them. Words appear around the age of 12 to 18 months; the average vocabulary of an eighteen-month-old child is around 50 words. A child’s first utterances are holophrases (literally “whole-sentences”), utterances that use just one word to communicate some idea. Several months after a child begins producing words, the child will produce two-word utterances, and within a few more months will begin to produce telegraphic speech, or short sentences that are less grammatically complex than adult speech, but that do show regular syntactic structure. From roughly the age of three to five years, a child’s ability to speak or sign is refined to the point that it resembles adult language.

The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered to be the earliest writing systems. It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion. A similar debate exists for the Chinese script, which developed around 1200 BC. The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including among others Olmec and Maya scripts) are generally believed to have had independent origins.

All languages change as speakers adopt or invent new ways of speaking and pass them on to other members of their speech community. Language change happens at all levels from the phonological level to the levels of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and discourse. Even though language change is often initially evaluated negatively by speakers of the language who often consider changes to be “decay” or a sign of slipping norms of language usage, it is natural and inevitable.

There are only 250 countries in the world corresponding to some 6,000 languages, which means that most countries are multilingual and most languages therefore exist in close contact with other languages.

SIL Ethnologue defines a “living language” as “one that has at least one speaker for whom it is their first language”. The exact number of known living languages varies from 6,000 to 7,000, depending on the precision of one’s definition of “language”, and in particular, on how one defines the distinction between a “language” and a “dialect”. As of 2016, Ethnologue cataloged 7,097 living human languages.

According to the Ethnologue, 389 languages (nearly 6%) have more than a million speakers. These languages together account for 94% of the world’s population, whereas 94% of the world’s languages account for the remaining 6% of the global population.

There is no clear distinction between a language and a dialect, notwithstanding a famous aphorism attributed to linguist Max Weinreich that “a language is a dialect with an army and navy”.

Language endangerment occurs when a language is at risk of falling out of use as its speakers die out or shift to speaking another language. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers, and becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all, it becomes an extinct language. While languages have always gone extinct throughout human history, they have been disappearing at an accelerated rate in the 20th and 21st centuries due to the processes of globalization and neo-colonialism, where the economically powerful languages dominate other languages.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) operates with five levels of language endangerment: “safe”, “vulnerable” (not spoken by children outside the home), “definitely endangered” (not spoken by children), “severely endangered” (only spoken by the oldest generations), and “critically endangered” (spoken by a few members of the oldest generation, often semi-speakers). Despite claims that the world would be better off if most adopted a single common lingua franca, such as English or Esperanto, there is a consensus that the loss of languages harms the cultural diversity of the world. It is a common belief, going back to the biblical narrative of the tower of Babel in the Old Testament, that linguistic diversity causes political conflict, but many of the world’s major episodes of violence have taken place in situations with low linguistic diversity, such as the Yugoslav and American Civil War, or the genocide of Rwanda, the Ukrainian War.

So, there is no definite answer. Though the indefiniteness of things has always hurt me; if only it would be possible to understand everything, to make it all whole and understand it, but the world is world in its indefiniteness.

And, therefore, because there is no definiteness, because, sadly, there is not, here is also mine – another indefinite one. That probably overlaps with one of the theories listed in the footnote, but the definition is mine and that’s what I have taught.

What is a language? How can one imagine the beginning of its origin? What would cause someone to speak? The antecessor, whoever that is, is living in the terrifying conditions of the nature, with certain groups, providing food, confronting dangers as big as the world, has not yet reached to thinking up the God. The forest is big and threatening, the kilometers of the plains are uncountable, the gorges are awful and deep, there is night and day, but there is no time. There is the feeling of thirst, the feeling of hunger, and there is the need for security which has passed beyond instinct. In a place, where things should be arranged, agreed on, communicated, “be talked” beyond the more instinctive, onomatopoeic communication, because the way of becoming a human has moved them away from a place where the animalistic unconsciousness was, therefore, also the power, and brought them to a place where the power and its search is in the consciousness, in new findings, new skull, new knowledge, new emotions and in their sharing. So, the language should have appeared in this crack, in the split of the old strength and new strength, old weakness and new weakness, because a human suggests a weaker animal left in himself, an animal suggests an originating human, yet weak, but even in this transitional moment the huge dangers are not canceled. And maybe even exactly they have created that transition. So, the antecessor-animal needed to agree on where the hunting was, how to hunt together, how not to miss when your claws and previous instincts have abandoned you, the speed of your running, your weight, your fur, when you have started to understand better and get more afraid, when you have started to realize the danger, have started to feel the unavoidable, approaching, unescapable, the death. And that makes you to get a tongue, which stretches for tens of thousands or millions of years. The unavoidable and the danger, although in such a long time, give you a language. With the help of which you can also maybe avoid it a bit? Postpone? Move away? To postpone. What? My answer to my students was: the death.

The language originated to postpone… the death!

What a huge reason! So, we talk, communicate, gesture, explain to each other, make clear for each other, for ourselves, for the world, to postpone our and others’ deaths. And for that we need all the words and all the communicating silences.

So, the language gives us its millions of tools to solve this problem – very little, a tiny bit, a pinch of, and we teach to use only some of the words for writing? Only the literary ones? Only the beautiful ones? So, the whole communication is pointless? Needless? Is only some enough? Is it, really? Can we die some?

To keep immaculate what? Something that constantly enormously moves and grows and has always moved and grown, has become more than its creator, needs immaculateness? Even if we accept that we know what immaculate is. As if we are protecting the language? From dying? We? But for whom the bell tolls?

Exactly the opposite, dears, to keep the language immaculate means to want to kill the language, to block the flows that nourish it, which the language itself manages better than all its protectօrs. We simply wrap on language our own insignificance, our unknowing, our fears on the language. But the language is big, it is a scope, and it lives. We should only be the ones that keep it alive. Its im/maculateness is its own business and is not a matter left to our weak ruling.

And one last thing, another question: how? In that case, how to use the language? After the explanations mentioned above, my students would get excited and tell that oh, they wrote on Tamara’s birthday cake Happy Birthday [in English] and their teacher scolded them for that. As you know, young people are always prone to rushing to the other end of what they were told. They don’t know yet that the opposite of a standard is another standard as well. That knowledge is not two opposing parallels but is a net. And when they would hear me saying that I think the teacher did the right thing, their new knowledge would get clogged in their heads. In the end, how to understand what you’ve said, Mrs. Anna? Often I had to make culturological turns, but about those – not now.

Here too, I am using again Walter Benjamin’s theory of pure language.

He considers the pure language the nourishing place, the supreme treasure house, where there are all the intentions of all the languages of naming things. That is a trans-language space from where all the languages are able “to guess” things and transfer them with words or other expressions. The word ‘stone’ in all languages and in their intentions of naming it in their unique ways is located in the pure language. But in the pure language the stone is all of these together. If there are 7097 languages now to say stone, they all are the same, all are one thing in the pure language; they are the intentions of saying that.

By analogy of pure language, I think of suggesting the concept of the pure thought, meaning the thought that has not gotten a language yet in the speech but has its own language, is a language inside the head. The language of the thought, the language of the thing that was thought. Almost an intangible thing. Even with the mind. Which already includes not only the main material of the thought of the thinker but also its nature, perspective, place, distance or closeness, context, hypertext…  everything. Which one still has to bring and put on the tongue-organ. I want to ask, is it possible to write down that thought with all the units, whose condition comes from that thought, from the thing that was thought and will express that thought in the best way possible? Meaning to put down the thought, to compose it with all the possible words which would express that thought within the intentions of its pureness. That is, they would make language the best way to communicate that thought. And therefore, also the best way to postpone death, to postpone our death, to postpone the death of the language. Even if the best expression would include one literary, one colloquial, one vernacular, one jargon, one professional, one dialectal, one Western Armenian, one Russian, one English, etc. words and one swear word, then this combination would be the best and most preferred way to express our thought.

And if we speak up our thoughts, it always saves. It saves us. And the language.

This way or that, I see the resistance of these thoughts in our present but I also see the possibility to exploit them in the future; the irrelevant abuse-misuse of words, using that as a poor creativity, which will become another unrelatedness, like the way the Armenian advertisement industry learned and uses the words “tuyn” [a colloquial way to say amazing] and “haves” [a colloquial way to say cool] at random only because it is now allowed and in the advertisement you don’t have to be authentic.

Maybe the above idea is really about “do-s,” about allowing things, yes, the language can be used like that – from literary to cuss words. But when the “do-s” are there, let’s consider they are, is there the ability though? As such, based on that, I consider it unnecessary to pose the question of language; we pose that question a lot. As if we should find a language for writing. As if it is the problem of the Armenian language. Especially for literature. That question, as an infinite problem is being brought on social media. It’s not hard to find the language, especially when everything is allowed, but what should we do? This is not a language problem; this is a thought problem. Thought is languageless, so that Armenian language could give it a language. And beyond Armenian, things could give it a language. To think thoughts. Which would have their own language in the head. A thought with a language. So a language, not after the thought, not separate from the thought, but with the thought, within it. Thoughtlanguage!

And, thus, language saves us. Language has changed since its origin, but the same way has also the death – in its ways, types, nature, and diversity, even in its physicality. The dangers have never been cancelled; it is always possible to die. If death goes extinct, what will happen to the language?

But literature is a space for thoughts, for expressing them as much as possible, combining ingenious words, communicating in the best way possible, talking to everyone, sharing thoughts with everyone, therefore, being understood, therefore being tolerated, therefore postponing the death as much as possible.

And this is not about just one person. About one person’s life or death. Although, who knows? Or maybe, why not? Or, perhaps, exactly is! Language has thousands of saving hands.

October 2024

Iowa

Translated from Armenian by Ani Jilavyan and Anna Davtyan