7/19/25 – The novel will never die. We would like to see a revival of civilization’s ancient tradition of transmitting knowledge and history orally, such as through stories. Our native and our Jewish people are good examples of this. The written word is fixed onto material, therefore, easily reviewed, copied, and disseminated, but the oral tradition has something special – cadence. The sound of words has a power unto itself. God speaks. He doesn’t write. We write.
For example, in our native sisters’ and brothers’ beautiful oral stories, no matter where their bones may lie, their ancestors’ feet walk through their words. It is part of the stories’ beat and lends its own music to their history, culture and traditions.
The best part of God’s creation of us in his image is our own humanity in our divine complexities. Our stories, memories and mental faculties have been forged by millennia of oral tradition. Our imaginations will never die. Let us not let our oral traditions fade away and, with it, this part of our divine humanity. Let us retain the power of the spoken word. All glory and praise be to God. Thank you, Lord, for making us in your image.
7/19/25 – It is helpful to compare the written and spoken word, which has numerous expressions, to the universal system we use to transmit knowledge – our number system. It is arguably the greatest human invention in our collective history. Below is a quick, AI-generated, summary of the history of the Indo-Arabic numeral system. We cannot do math or most science orally. It must be written down, and we have a system, a language that is not spoken, to facilitate this type of knowledge and discovery. It is also universal, meaning the whole world uses the same system. Richness in language would be lost if we all spoke the same one. Richness in math and science would be hindered if we didn’t use the same system. Does our written mathematical and scientific tradition, which lacks an oral counterpart, bring us closer to or pull us farther from God? Perhaps its magnificence has the potential to delude us into thinking we could be (a) god?
“A concise overview of the Indo-Arabic numeral system, which gave us the digits 0–9 we use today:
Origins in India
• Developed in India around the 6th–7th century CE.
• Based on a decimal place-value system, which was revolutionary for its time.
• Early forms evolved from Brahmi numerals, later refined during the Gupta period.
The Invention of Zero
• Indian mathematician Brahmagupta (628 CE) was the first to treat zero as a number and define its operations.
• The concept of śūnya (void) was central to Indian cosmology and mathematics.
Transmission to the Islamic World
• Persian scholar Al-Khwarizmi introduced Indian numerals to the Islamic world in the 9th century through his work On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals.
• Islamic mathematicians adopted and refined the system, recognizing its efficiency.
Spread to Europe
• Through translations of Arabic texts, the system reached Europe by the 12th century.
• Italian mathematician Fibonacci popularized it in his 1202 book Liber Abaci, calling it modus Indorum (‘method of the Indians’).
Global Adoption
• The system gradually replaced Roman numerals due to its simplicity and power.
• Today, it’s the universal standard for arithmetic, science, and commerce.”
7/20/25 – One of the contributions that the Arabic world made to the Indian number system is to simplify the script from the Brahmi original. Although not structural in nature but more aesthetic, this helped it become the universal number system that it is today. Likewise, English is the lingua franca and uses the Roman alphabet, the Latin script, even though it belongs to the Germanic language family not the Italic (Latin) language family. India had long-standing, ancient trade routes and contact with the Middle East, and Christianity brought the Latin script to England. The Latin script, like the Arabic digits, is simple and easy to use. Therefore, one can conclude that a feature of a universal language and script will be the ease with which users can replicate its symbols.
Another interesting aspect of the cross-pollination of different languages is that Greek is really the only language that belongs to the Hellenistic language family. Relative to English or Spanish, it is spoken by few people and in a small number of countries. However, Greek is one of the key languages of the Christian Bible, and there are numerous classical texts written in it. It also has another important use – math and science. Although it is not a part of our universal number system, it is routinely used in advanced math, statistics, finance and science.
Taken together, we have the universal Indian numeral system, which uses Arabic script, the lingua franca of English, which uses the Latin script, and Greek, which also gets used in English but primarily in math, stats, finance and the sciences. The order of the universe is such that human’s creations build on each other in many ways and from various traditions. If one wants purity, it doesn’t exist because that’s not how God designed the universe. If one wants cultural domination, it also doesn’t exist because that’s not how God designed human beings. Whether we want to or not, we will ultimately end up learning from each other. So, let us as a collective civilization contribute instead of conquer. Happy Sunday, and remember God loves you with a deep and abiding love.
7/22/25 – Every nonnative English speaker that we’ve ever known has complained about the pronunciation. (Even native speakers can find the pronunciation of English words hard.) One of the contributing factors to the difficulty of English pronunciation is likely that the script changed. However, one will note that it is nonetheless the lingua franca. So, another conclusion could be that the simplicity of the script is more important than the correspondence of the script (the letter) to the sound, with the simplicity of the script and the letter-sound correspondence having an inverse relationship. This might seem strange since nonnative English speakers invariably struggle with the pronunciation, and one would think a language with accents and more consistent pronunciation would prevail as the lingua franca. However, upon deeper consideration, one doesn’t really need the script to make and to memorize the sound of words correctly. In other words, the letter-sound correspondence might end up being irrelevant since many people will end up ignoring the individual letters (or phonemes) and just focus on correctly replicating and memorizing the sound for the entire word (in its context). This brings us full circle to where we started on the importance of oral traditions. Many people likely memorized the words of the stories by sound as much as by meaning.