The day started off with some of the book presentations. After those presentations, we received a short introduction into the ToK’s view of language. Which strongly reminded me of one of the exhibitions we had had presented to us by the 6th graders some time ago. In the presentation, the student had shown using a dictionary of I think Japanese to English how some Knowledge gets transferred through language and cannot be replicated using another language. After the introduction into the ToK day a Linguist come to our class. First, he prompted a discussion of what classifies something as language with the question: If Swiss German is a language on its own or if it rather a version of normal German or as we call it: High German. Some argued it is not a language on its own because it does not have a uniform set of grammatical rules. The linguist countered that there are many languages which can’t even be written, and that Swiss German is distinct enough from high German for Germans not to understand Swiss German. On which we argued that it might be distinct but so is the Italian spoken in Sicily, but it is still not considered a separate language. In the end this discussion did not lead to a conclusive answer, but it was interesting to think about the integrity of languages like the fore mentioned Swiss German, Sicilian Italian but also for languages like Alsace German or Quebecer French. Then the linguist explained that there are many subfields of linguistics, which is the study of Language. Like for example Sociolinguistic, Historical Linguistics, Theoretical Linguistics, Typology, Language documentation and so on. He specifically was working in the fields of Typology and Language documentation. Typology as we learned is the study of linguistic diversity and universal properties (or tendencies) and Language documentation is self-explanatory. As an example, for his work as a Typologist he presented a world map which shows the distribution of languages which have the verb first in a sentence. Those languages are most prominent on the pacific islands, in the pacific Northwest, Mesoamerica and northern Africa. He further elaborated that verb initially is rare in the world and that the phenomenon is understudied. In his time working on this project, he visited some of the people that speak those languages to try and preserve their language. He presented us a bunch of those cultures and talked about his experience working and living with them. Most of them are small groups, in some of them only a handful of people still can talk their original language. Many of those small cultures abandoned their language because among other things it wasn’t practical to speak their language, or they even got discriminated for it. We also learned about some of the specialty of those languages which for us who mainly speak German or English sound very unfamiliar, like for example Ejective sounds, complex clusters, Lexical suffixes and forming the Plural be reduplication or infixation. After the interesting presentation of the Linguist, we headed out for Lunch and when we came back were greeted by the story of the Herculaneum Papyri. Those Papyri are scrolls from the time of Ancient Greece, which were found in a villa in Pompeii. This Villa was covered by volcanic ash during the reign of the Vesuv and through the fire and heat the papyri were carbonated and thus conserved. When this villa was dug out and the scrolls were found, scientist tried to find out what was written on them by some rather bizarre methods. The scrolls couldn’t just be unrolled because they were fully burned, so scientist tried to cut them open or pour mercury on them, with predictably bad results. Many of the scrolls were destroyed that way. There was one method to unroll them without destroying the text using a specialized machine, but it took way too long. So, the Knowledge preserved on those Papyri was inaccessible to us until recently a group of scientists found a way to x-ray the scrolls and virtually unwrap them. Using the story of the Herculaneum Papyri and a few Internal Assessment prompts, we subsequently had to write a mini exhibition like the one done by the 6th graders mentioned before. And so ended this day of ToK.

Daniel Freimann 5i