We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.
Interpretation
This quote addresses the complex and tragic history of how the English language came to dominate among Indigenous peoples in the U.S.
Jared Diamond's quote illustrates the dark history behind the spread of the English language among Indigenous peoples in the United States. It emphasizes that the adoption of English by Native Americans was not a matter of choice or preference, but rather a direct consequence of violence, oppression, and the imposition of English by colonizers who decimated Indigenous populations through war and disease. This highlights the broader themes of cultural loss and the impacts of colonization.
In practice
In a discussion about the impacts of colonization on Indigenous cultures.
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War.
Your ancestors came to Macedonia and the rest of Hellas [Greece] and did us great harm, though we had done them no prior injury. I have been appointed leader of the Greeks, and wanting to punish the Persians I have come to Asia, which I took from you.
All the old history was written for the amusement of the ruling classes. The lower classes couldn't read, and their rulers didn't care about remembering what happened to them.
This wicked man Hitler, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred. this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame.
Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society.
In Brazil, the history of the interaction between blancos and indios - whites and Indians - often reads like an extended epitaph. Tribes were wiped out by disease and massacres; languages and songs were obliterated.
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