Wow, what a great topic for discussion Magpie! Warning: the following will probably be a monster post. Sorry!
I grew up in a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual environment. Till age three German was my primary language (the others: Ukrainian, English, a bit of Polish). But once I started school at 4 1/2, English quickly outstriped the other languages, leaving my volcabulary/grammar basically stopped at 4 years of age, in preference to continuing development of my English. Which is the reason why I generally choose to express myself in English....
In my school French studies, which included some immersion stuff, I got so I could carry on a dining table discussion with native French speakers and have them understand pretty much understand me.
So... with this HUGELY definitive knowledge (not!) I have experienced the reality of certain concepts being more expressable within certain languages. My poliglot relatives knew this instinctively and mostly unconsciously - and it is not at all uncommon for them to start off a sentence in - say - German, switch to Romanian, and finish off in Polish. Handy for them, hard on the rest of us!
Sometimes I suspect this happened because they wished to deliberately obscure something spoken (like keeping talk of SEX out of Little Pitcher's Ears.) More often I imagine it was because they preferred to express themselves with colloquialisms and/or catch phrases that were untranslatable from language to language. Translation involves a lot more than changing words/grammar forms around; much of it depends on cultural context which is like the soil you put a particular seed into in order to grow something out of it successfuly. Sometimes you have to be able to literally see out of the mindset of a particular culture to understand the significance of a phrase - perhaps the most difficult thing for a language student to do... though possible for a person who learned an alternative language as a child.
And distinctions can exist even inside language GROUPS, apparently. I have heard writers fluent in both comparing the Slavic language group tongues Russian and Ukrainian compare then by saying that Russian is an excellent language to express analytical concepts, and would be a natural for anyone writing a detective novel. Ukrainian, by contrast, incorporates many words of vivid creative imagerary and would be ideal for writing fantasy/science fiction.
I can't attest to this with personal experience, but this makes sense to me. Linguistically for various reasons Ukrainian (like English) is more of a hodgepodge language, becoming the beneficiary of volcabulary acquired from conquests and trading relationships (with Turks, Greeks, Vikings, Tatars, Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Austrians & Russians themselves). I would guess that there are probably more "foreign" words incorporated into that language...and as such probably a larger available volcabulary in general as well as allowing for more ways to say similar things. All quite useful when writing fantasy or science fiction.
Russian language, arising from a more isolated environment with fewer "outside" influences, may have a smaller volcabulary, more striped down grammar, and probably simpler, more efficient expressions (mere educated guesswork on my part). If true, it sounds to me as though Raymond Chandler might transfer quite effectively into Russian.
My insight into French is that the language follows a cultural tendency to "prettify" things other cultures wouldn't bother with. I keep thinking of the (probably antiquated) polite expression for a woman's monthly menses, "J'ai me fleurs" (right?)meanomg "I have my flowers". Just the existence of such a phrase says two things to me. Therein, a clinical reality is replaced with a poetic one. This implies that one CAN talk about such subjects in public, or else why would there even exist a pretty, polite version? I suspect this elasticity of expression is a lot of the reason French became a lingua franca.
A fascinating long book could be written exploring the means various languages evolved to handle difficult or taboo concepts. There seems to be various ways to do it... leaving only the lucky poliglots among us to pick and choose.
no subject
I grew up in a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual environment. Till age three German was my primary language (the others: Ukrainian, English, a bit of Polish). But once I started school at 4 1/2, English quickly outstriped the other languages, leaving my volcabulary/grammar basically stopped at 4 years of age, in preference to continuing development of my English. Which is the reason why I generally choose to express myself in English....
In my school French studies, which included some immersion stuff, I got so I could carry on a dining table discussion with native French speakers and have them understand pretty much understand me.
So... with this HUGELY definitive knowledge (not!) I have experienced the reality of certain concepts being more expressable within certain languages. My poliglot relatives knew this instinctively and mostly unconsciously - and it is not at all uncommon for them to start off a sentence in - say - German, switch to Romanian, and finish off in Polish. Handy for them, hard on the rest of us!
Sometimes I suspect this happened because they wished to deliberately obscure something spoken (like keeping talk of SEX out of Little Pitcher's Ears.) More often I imagine it was because they preferred to express themselves with colloquialisms and/or catch phrases that were untranslatable from language to language. Translation involves a lot more than changing words/grammar forms around; much of it depends on cultural context which is like the soil you put a particular seed into in order to grow something out of it successfuly. Sometimes you have to be able to literally see out of the mindset of a particular culture to understand the significance of a phrase - perhaps the most difficult thing for a language student to do... though possible for a person who learned an alternative language as a child.
And distinctions can exist even inside language GROUPS, apparently. I have heard writers fluent in both comparing the Slavic language group tongues Russian and Ukrainian compare then by saying that Russian is an excellent language to express analytical concepts, and would be a natural for anyone writing a detective novel. Ukrainian, by contrast, incorporates many words of vivid creative imagerary and would be ideal for writing fantasy/science fiction.
I can't attest to this with personal experience, but this makes sense to me. Linguistically for various reasons Ukrainian (like English) is more of a hodgepodge language, becoming the beneficiary of volcabulary acquired from conquests and trading relationships (with Turks, Greeks, Vikings, Tatars, Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Austrians & Russians themselves). I would guess that there are probably more "foreign" words incorporated into that language...and as such probably a larger available volcabulary in general as well as allowing for more ways to say similar things. All quite useful when writing fantasy or science fiction.
Russian language, arising from a more isolated environment with fewer "outside" influences, may have a smaller volcabulary, more striped down grammar, and probably simpler, more efficient expressions (mere educated guesswork on my part). If true, it sounds to me as though Raymond Chandler might transfer quite effectively into Russian.
My insight into French is that the language follows a cultural tendency to "prettify" things other cultures wouldn't bother with. I keep thinking of the (probably antiquated) polite expression for a woman's monthly menses, "J'ai me fleurs" (right?)meanomg "I have my flowers". Just the existence of such a phrase says two things to me. Therein, a clinical reality is replaced with a poetic one. This implies that one CAN talk about such subjects in public, or else why would there even exist a pretty, polite version? I suspect this elasticity of expression is a lot of the reason French became a lingua franca.
A fascinating long book could be written exploring the means various languages evolved to handle difficult or taboo concepts. There seems to be various ways to do it... leaving only the lucky poliglots among us to pick and choose.