My opinion, for English as we have it: absolutely we need to shuck it off, one way or the other. This may mean transforming it (e-prmitive), it may mean abandoning it.
More and more, as I listen to communication around me, and reflect on what I continue to learn about indigenous languaging and language-worlds, I think of the old software programmer’s truism: GIGO…or, Garbage In, Garbage Out.
It means the computer works fine. If your codes sucks, the computer will do sucky things. If your code rocks, the computer will do rockin’ things.
I feel the same way (god help me, a computer analogy for our brains…forgive me) about how our minds work. Our language will either help us, or hinder us, to see the world through rewilding eyes. A language designed to reinforce a domesticated worldview (and modern English has a staggering array of, pardon my french, mindfucks, such as “time is money” - imagine if you lived in a culture with neither a concept for time, nor money, nor a verb ‘to be’…?)
My question of the moment: if anthropologists and linguists believe that the death of a language, means essentially the death of a particular worldview and culture, and you belonged to a world-devouring culture, would you then choose to abandon its language, to accelerate its death?
Jason, I respect that you and I differ on this point; I seem to only grow more confident, as the years turn, that in the end our language perpetrates a sinister array of hypnotic coercions, that keep us, and many of the folks who we look to as mentors of rewildilng, in the grip of civilization and domestication, and the social illnesses that come with it.
Whew.