I have passed numerous Spanish classes pondering why preceding generations had not already successfully created a universal language. A linguistic revolution would effectively eliminate the inconvenient and time consuming struggle to understand across countries, races, and languages that has cursed mankind since, according to the book of Genesis, the Tower of Babel. If language is the key to communication, why not eliminate superfluous language all together?
However, language transcended its role as mere communication eons ago. It has evolved into an art, where choice words can be painstakingly chosen, as Van Gogh had selected specific shades of blues for his canvas, and molded together into sentences and rhetoric that can leave lasting impressions …show more content…
Its English equivalent is straightforward enough: the amount of water that can be held in a hand. This word has evolved between the petite fingers that children interlocked in order to trap water in the hot climate. It is witnessed in travellers feverishly gulping from a brook after a long day's journey, or in mothers pressing morsels of homemade buckwheat dough against clay oven walls.
This word has history, has a past. Its beauty is in the juxtaposition between individuality and standardization. A gurfa can describe the mere drops held in a toddler’s hand but is just as easily illustrates the mouthfuls of water that a large man can hold. Either way, it is enough for a drink. The child and the man are both satisfied with a gurfa, although the child’s gurfa is dwarfed by the man’s. Unfortunately, the peculiar nature of this unit of measurement is lost in the sea of standardization that permeates modern society. Enough is a mark on only Mary Poppins’ ruler, so it has a place in neither the classroom nor the workplace. The gurfa must remain in its homeland, where values are measured on needs, not