In last month’s issue I wrote about how learning a world language is a way to love your neighbor. In this month’s issue, we need to address the cultural mandate. Cultural mandate (sometimes also called the creational mandate) is the term generally used to refer to the first command that God gave to Adam and Eve. He said, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Gen. 1:28). This is repeated in Genesis 2 where it says that man was put in the garden to “work it and take care of it.”
Language is a part of creation and as such, demands our attention and our care. As a matter of fact, language is in a unique position because not only is it a part of creation, it also helps us to care for creation. Adam’s first specific job was to name the animals. This was and remains a language job. We continue to name animals as they are discovered in different regions of the world. We also name inventions, elements, molecules, parts of speech, and more. This particular naming task continues even though Adam died long ago. It is because of this naming that we are better able to care for and rule over creation. Without words and terms to describe the parts of creation that we have discovered and continue to discover, our knowledge would be woefully short and our care and ruling would be even worse than it already is. As we know, the more we know about something, the better able we are to care for it. This is why I bring my car to a mechanic. He knows more about cars than I do and will do a better job caring for it and fixing it than I will. It is also (perhaps) why you entrust your children to me and Mrs. Acosta to teach them Spanish and to Mrs. Klimes to teach them French, because we know the languages better.
Different languages highlight different parts of creation. It is because of this that we borrow words from other languages. Think of these words in English: moccasin, taco, canoe, rajah, blitz, raccoon, sheik. None of these are originally English. They describe things that we as English speakers found or noticed that other languages already had words for. So we borrowed their words. Therefore, studying different languages can give us insights into different parts of creation.
As with everything that God has created, each language has its own special beauty. Each language has its own beauty of sound as well as of word arrangement (grammar) and the cultural values that have been inculcated into that language. As it is with people, so it is with language. If we all looked the same, a lot of beauty would be missed. If we all spoke the same language, a lot of sound beauty would be missed. When we learn a world language (or languages), we embrace and come to a fuller knowledge of what God has made, and we should be moved to more and greater praise to him because of it.
This also should inspire us to care for language itself. We need to use languages in ways that are pleasing to God, in ways that express truth and praise, and in ways that preserve that which is good about languages. This does not only include our use (or nonuse) of bad words, but our use of good words in bad ways. We cannot know how to do this without knowing the language and how it works. This is true for our own language(s) as well as those world languages that we are trying to learn. By learning world languages, we are also helping to preserve them and the cultural knowledge inherent in them, which brings us back again to loving our neighbor.
In the last part of this series I will deal with the first and greatest commandment and its implication for language learning.