Mohammad Merajul ISLAM, mirajulislam0170-at-gmail.com

& Jacques COULARDEAU, dondaine-at-orange.fr

OPENING INVITATION

What happens to a language when, over centuries or millennia, it evolves brutally or progressively into non-existence or a new language? Is it the fate of all languages that are in contact with one another? Does it create silence for the people who used to speak it? Does this silence have an architecture?

What happens to the culture these people have accumulated in this language? Does it disappear, or does it survive the loss of the language? If it survives, does it prove it is not irrevocably attached to a particular language? Then, where and what is it attached to? If the words are dropped by linguistic evolution, do they plainly disappear, or are they borrowed and invested in the “new” language? Is it what is called etymology?

Take the case of the plow, and the three essential parts of it, the plowshare, the moldboard, and the coulter. The Celts, the Gaulish people in what is today France, were using a tool of the plow type with a metal plowshare. The Romans abandoned it for several centuries. It only reappeared under the guidance of the Benedictines, starting in the 8th century. Why did the Romans abandon the plow made of metal? They just had millions of slaves doing the work with a hoe. Yet the knowledge survived and could be reintroduced several centuries later. The Roman Empire imposed “silence” on this tool or machine, and the necessary knowledge. Yet it reappeared when the Carolingian Empire imposed 74 days of no work per year to respect the 52 Sundays and three one-week-long religious festivals (Nativity, Passion, and Assumption).

The proper question, to which we do not have a full answer, can involve the brain (a physical organ), the mind (a virtual construct of the central nervous system including the brain and communication that implies language), or some entoptic registering in the very muscular, physiological fiber of the body. We will not get to a final answer, but we will be confronted with the effect of Large Language Models and Artificial Intelligence on the languages of the world and the knowledge they all carry and codify.

Mohammad Merajul ISLAM & Jacques COULARDEAU, April 15, 2026

TRANSLITERATION INTO BANG-GLISH

I, Merajul, come from a country where the future does not wait for permission. Bangladesh. Rajshahi. A small room. A cracked screen. And a fire that no dataset has ever recorded.

I do not need to look at ancient history to find silenced languages. I can walk two hours from my home. Let me name them for you, reader not as museum pieces, but as wounds that are still bleeding:

v Santali. Spoken by millions, but written by whom? Its children learn Bangla in school. Its words do not appear in any large language model. When a Santali grandmother dies, her entire universe of forest and song disappears with her. No AI will mourn. No algorithm will archive her goodbye.

v Khasi. A language older than most nations. Its speakers live in the hills, but their voices do not reach the valley of the servers. In 2026, Khasi is being translated without consent, without context, by machines that have never tasted a single Khasi meal.

v Marma. The language of the river people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Fewer than 100,000 speakers remain. The young are switching to Bangla because their smartphones do not understand Marma. The machine does not adapt. The human must.

So, let me ask you, directly, not as a scholar, but as a survivor of this silence: If your language survives only in the memory of your grandmother, and no algorithm has been trained to hear it, do you still exist in the eyes of the future?

I have no degree from Oxford. No credit card for PayPal. No citation index. But I have something that no LLM can generate: a refusal to be silent. And I have decided the future will not be translated without me. You want to build a universal translator? Then first, learn to listen to a Santali lullaby. Do you want to save a dying language? Then come to my village and sit on the floor. Not to speak. To hear.

This is not an invitation to read a book. This is a declaration. The architecture of silence is real. But so is the hammer. And I am holding it.

Mohammad Merajul ISLAM & Jacques COULARDEAU, April 16, 2026

The Architecture of Silence: Language, Migration, and the Survival of Suppressed Civilizations

by Mohammad Merajul ISLAM (Author),

Jacques COULARDEAU (Author)

Éditions La Dondaine

Format: Kindle Edition, on Amazon sites around the world

SILENCE, THE ARCHITECTONIC ARCHIPELAGO

ENGLISH — Do not believe a civilization disappears completely in absolute silence. It might get stranded in oblivion for those who believe what they have forgotten does not exist, did not happen, or would not even claim any reality.

That’s good enough for those who seized some power, some existence, some territory, social, political, or cultural, good enough because that enables them to boost their own existence since before, there was nothing.

That also fits the minds of those who believe you must always eradicate the whole uncivilized past and present to enable the future to be born and to take over the whole cosmos in a preposterous suggestion that they are the direct heir of the Big Bang that is going to erect a perfectly empty memory into Alibaba’s creative teapot from which the new messiah, the new prophet, the new emperor, the new genius is going to emerge.

And in fact, this pulverized vision is nothing but a vast disorderly yet architectonic scattering of a multitude of islands in an infinite archipelago that contains only the descendants of the realities of the past, or the newly emerging present realities continuing, recuperating, transforming, and even multiplying the past entities.

This silence, this silencing procedure that eradicates, erases what everything present and future is coming, emerging, being born from in the past. The past is the procreating mother or the impregnating father, whose loving contortions of them both will cast into the world their children, offering their genetic and memorial heirlooms to the tempests, storms, and hurricanes of tomorrow.

FRANÇAIS — Ne croyez pas qu’une civilisation disparaisse complètement, laissant d’être elle un silence absolu. Elle peut sombrer dans l’oubli pour ceux qui croient que ce qu’ils ont oublié n’existe pas, n’a jamais eu lieu, ou ne revendique même pas la moindre réalité.

Cela suffit à ceux qui se sont emparés d’un certain pouvoir, d’une forme d’existence, d’un territoire, qu’il soit social, politique ou culturel ; cela leur suffit, car cela leur permet de consolider leur propre existence, puisqu’avant, il n’y avait rien.

Cela correspond également à la mentalité de ceux qui croient qu’il faut toujours éradiquer tout le passé et le présent non civilisés pour permettre à l’avenir de naître et de conquérir le cosmos tout entier. Ils prétendent, de façon absurde, être les héritiers directs du Big Bang qui va créer une mémoire parfaitement vide dans la théière créative d’Alibaba, d’où émergera le nouveau messie, le nouveau prophète, le nouvel empereur, le nouveau génie.

En réalité, cette vision pulvérisée n’est rien d’autre qu’une vaste dispersion désordonnée, quoique architecturale, d’une multitude d’îles au sein d’un archipel infini qui ne renferme que les descendants des réalités passées, ou les réalités présentes qui émergent et qui perpétuent, récupèrent, transforment, voire multiplient les entités du passé.

Ce silence, ce processus de mise sous silence qui éradique, efface ce dont tout présent et tout futur provient, émerge, naît du passé. Le passé est la mère procréatrice ou le père fécondant, dont les contorsions amoureuses de l’un comme de l’autre, engendreront dans le monde leurs enfants, offrant leur héritage génétique et mémoriel aux tempêtes, aux orages et aux ouragans de demain.