After spending half the morning re-editing an English-language text that had been altered by a non-native English speaker, I was struck by the gulf that divides those of differing mother tongues; it is unbridgeable and the cause seems to be wholly different mindsets about how to communicate. I say this having no command of any language, but with the feeling that I have been 'at home' in English all my life.
At the most superficial level. German comes out authoritarian, French mysteriously ambivalent, Italian ornate yet often cruelly direct.
Many years ago a Library user was asked in Cambridge by a Nigerian colleague if Italian could cope with scientific terminology or simply imported the terms. That query has a much wider application.
7 comments:
how do you think english comes out?
Used fully, Ithink it comes out as what the speaker wants it to be; it is so flexible, possibly from such widespread adoption and hence transformations-in-use, that it feels like a state to be in rather than a representation of a state.
Anyway, I' ve long suspected that everyone secretly thinks in English but wilfully uses other languages (which the Thought Police probably do not allow me to think).
i used to think that - i remember watching barnaby-the-bear-'s-my-name-never-call-me-jack-or-jane dubbed into italian and wondering why they had bothered seeing as clearly if the slightly older girls we were playing with could understand it at all it must be because they could speak english really; and so then why did they (the girls) persist in talking to us in italian...
my editor actually asked me if book had been written in italian and then translated, or had i written it in english directly? so maybe i do think in italian even if i'm writing in english...
Giules, are you suggesting that the whole world secretly thinks in Italian? The Roman Empire collapsed 2000 years ago! Or thereabouts. And anyway spoke Latin, I think.
Perhaps we don't think in a language at all, but in film-like frames; only when communicating with another do we language things up.
traduttore traditore, the Italians say [translator traitor]. People think in their mother tongue, unless they have a very high command of another language, and then they can switch from one to the other, never use both simultaneously. Please abandon imperial statements about English, I am sure ciniangi is just as good if it is your mother tongue or master it enough.
of course it is. i think we were talking about how things seem to one not making claims about how they might actually be. at least i was.
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