A language’s active ‘imperial’ voice shapes how its intellectual tools impose agency.

Evidence

English’s elaborate and nuanced conjugational system for verbs, and its typical insistence on the active, ‘imperial’ voice, are foreign to elegant Indonesian, which prefers the passive voice, and is gifted with the untranslatable terverb-prefix, by which the agent versus object axis disappears in a connotational cloud whose silver lining is Chance. Fine Indonesian prose is still infused with an orality long vanished from formal English – which is why Anglicized Indonesian academic writing is, if possible, even more ugly than its UK or US counterparts. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 828

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that English’s active voice is ‘imperial’ connects directly to postcolonial critiques of how Western theory carries its assumptions in its grammar — scaffolding for how Orientalism travels linguistically. — connects to: English functions today as a global hegemonic post-clerical Latin. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 781; Language’s defining power enforces social structures by silencing alternatives — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 609; Language enables meanings rather than passively carrying them (+3 more)

Related

• English functions today as a global hegemonic post-clerical Latin. (similarity 0.82)
• English serves as the carrier medium of cultural and linguistic imperialism in globalization (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Language enables meanings rather than passively carrying them #expands (0.80)
• Language’s defining power enforces social structures by silencing alternatives #expands (0.78) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 609
• Orientalism disciplined the exotic into lexicons, codes, and clichés #exemplifies (0.75) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 487
• Language can distort as well as transmit human culture #expands (0.74)
• Speaking a language means assuming its entire culture and civilization. #expands (0.72)