Reconstructing The Lost Tribe Essay Sample

Language is often interpreted as the soul of a nation, a mirror for national mentality and people’s way of life. In language a people accumulates its knowledge about the world and general life attitude. Thus, it is possible to make assumptions about a nation based solely on its language, sayings and various peculiarities of its active and passive lexis.
Now, a new civilization has been discovered and certain text corpus has been extracted from its material legacy. After some statistical and anthropological research, its language and peculiar patterns of it have been explored. On the basis of this research, we will attempt to restructure the mentality of the civilization to a certain extent. Beyond any doubt, the nation was peaceful, agricultural and humanistic.
First of all, let us tackle the topic of nation’s territory and climate. As there are three words for terrain, meaning “flat”, “rolling” and “slightly hilly”, we may conclude that the ground was suitable for agriculture. However, the vocabulary lacks a word denoting an ocean, thus the nation may not have been acquired with vast water surface or simply did not differentiate oceans and seas. Concluding that territory was rather plain and not washed by big waters, most probably the climate was temperate, with rains but little snow (as there is only one word denoting it).
The provision of food is an important question for every state. Having both favorable landscape and climate, agriculture was greatly developed without a doubt. Moreover, this argument is supported by the presence of dozen terms for various grains. In addition, it seems that cattle breeding was also developed, but cattle meat was not consumed, as words denoting beef, pork, veal etc. are absent. This may be due to religious or philosophical reasons, with latter being more plausible, question of which is touched upon in the paragraphs below.
The tribe was apparently very peaceful. Not only there are noe words for war or violent arguments, but praise is always interpreted in terms of peacemaking and conciliation. The chances are that the art of negotiations was greatly developed within the nation. We may also conclude that the structure of a state was adequately elaborated so to avoid conflicts and battles. The evidence shows that there was no single leader or king of the state, as there are several words for “leader”, but they are all plural. Thus, probably the state was ruled some kind of a council or board, with all members being equal.
The nation stuck to the principle of peace and equality not only when facing others, but also within itself. Words designating citizens are not derogatory in any way. Children were treated with great affection, as they were called wise, innocent, leaders and stargazers, which leaves us with an image of pure dreamy creatures. In addition, the word “sex” translates as “to plant a wise one”, which is a highly respectable and philosophical interpretation of the physiological act. Another argument is that terms for woman are synonymous with “wife and mother” and terms for man are close to “husband and father”. This also proves that the notion of family was greatly valued in this civilization. Also, since there are no special markers for terms of women and men and the leader role never belongs to one person, we may conclude that women and men were considered equal, thus the civilization was neither patriarchal not matriarchal, but rather of a harmonious balance of both sexes.
Having this strong anthropocentric stance towards life, the nation has a peculiar view on human development troughout the lifetime. As was mentioned, there are several words for children; also, there are seven words to describe the stages of life until the puberty stage; after that, there is only one term to describe the period after puberty until the moment of death. Possibly, this is the result of the philosophy of the nation. Since children are treated with adequate care and respect, they develop to be a comprehensive and stable human beings, thus after puberty their character and set of values remains the same till they pass away. Also, there may be no distinction between “adult” and “old”, because the nation seems to be above such unnecessary divisions, deriving simply from the number of years the person has lived. Why is there seven words to denote states preceding puberty? It can be concluded that due to physiological and hormonal changes, young citizens still undergo changes, which should be noted for the sake of convenience and language adequacy.
Naturally, having philosophical views so advanced, the nation also had an elaborated system of arts. Twenty words for “book”, nine for “artist” and four for “theater” prove the statement. Since the most numerous are words for different types of books, we can only imagine how literary developed and diverse was the nation. Also, nine words for “artist” show that arts were also numerable and much appreciated, with one of the most popular being drama.