If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the critical role of language and writing in preserving humanity and civilization.
Robert Bringhurst's quote highlights the importance of language and writing as fundamental to human civilization. It suggests that while the loss of language might signify a profound loss for humanity itself, the loss of writing would only affect certain forms of society and culture, implying that alternative societies could still thrive without it. This perspective invites reflection on the resilience of human experience and the varied forms civilization can take, even in the face of loss.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of preserving indigenous languages.
Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.
Typography exists to honor content.
In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency. It's other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.
When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?
Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry.
She supposed that houses, after all - like the lives that were lived in them - were mostly made of space. It was the spaces, in fact, which counted, rather than the bricks.
Techniques employ four qualities that reflect the nature of our world. Depending on the circumstance, you should be: hard as a diamond, flexible as a willow, smooth-flowing like water, or as empty as space.
Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.
For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?
The death penalty not only takes away the life of the person strapped to the table - it takes away a little bit of the humanity in each of us.
It is not the man who is responsible for the offerings as they become Christ's Body and Blood; it is Christ Himself who was crucified for us. The standing figure belongs to the priest who speaks these words. The power and the grace belong to God. 'This is My Body,' he says. And these words transform the offerings.
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