sistermagpie (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sistermagpie) wrote2004-12-11 10:27 pm
sistermagpie) wrote2004-12-11 10:27 pm
Speaking in tongues
Today was S's last day in my Saturday ballet class, because she's been transferred back to Germany, which is where she is from. She said she hoped one day to get transferred to India because she speaks Hindi, which I thought was really cool. She said Hindi sounded something like German and English because they're all Indo-Germanic languages.
C, who is also in this class, is from France. So we started talking about speaking different languages and C said that she was much more outgoing about her feelings in English, that she was very shy in French but now sometimes got frustrated speaking to her family or her best friend thinking, "This would be easier if you understood English." She felt she was sort of hiding behind the language but also letting her true self show more...which made sense to me, somehow. I'm sure if I ever finally mastered another language well enough to communicate in it I might feel that way. It also made me think of a discussion about TTT where somebody said it was fake the way Elrond and Arwen switched from English to Elvish in mid-conversation, only to have some multi-lingual people say no, that was very realistic, that they often switched languages depending on the subject. Some things are more easily spoken about in different languages.
So I thought I'd throw this out to the amazingly polyglot people on lj--I know some of you speak more than one language...do you find differences in yourself from one language to another? Do you all often speak English or just write in it? I used to have a bookmark I made that said, "To speak another language is to possess another soul" or something like that--does it seem like that? Does what C said make sense to you?
C, who is also in this class, is from France. So we started talking about speaking different languages and C said that she was much more outgoing about her feelings in English, that she was very shy in French but now sometimes got frustrated speaking to her family or her best friend thinking, "This would be easier if you understood English." She felt she was sort of hiding behind the language but also letting her true self show more...which made sense to me, somehow. I'm sure if I ever finally mastered another language well enough to communicate in it I might feel that way. It also made me think of a discussion about TTT where somebody said it was fake the way Elrond and Arwen switched from English to Elvish in mid-conversation, only to have some multi-lingual people say no, that was very realistic, that they often switched languages depending on the subject. Some things are more easily spoken about in different languages.
So I thought I'd throw this out to the amazingly polyglot people on lj--I know some of you speak more than one language...do you find differences in yourself from one language to another? Do you all often speak English or just write in it? I used to have a bookmark I made that said, "To speak another language is to possess another soul" or something like that--does it seem like that? Does what C said make sense to you?
no subject
It may have been that she just happened to use a phrase that did so we all jumped on it. It's like certain German phrases that sound almost like English for whatever reason. I know nothing of Hindi at all so I couldn't begin to say what it had in common with anything, but S may have been trying to just say there were some structural similarities and I over-simplified what she was saying. I don't know if she speaks any other languages, so she might have been comparing it something else as well.
I know nothing about LotR, but the switching you described would have seemed very clever and realistic to me.
It did very much seem realistic to me at the time. I assume the scriptwriters went with their instinct about when to use it--and Viggo Mortenson loved speaking Elvish so they could be pretty free with it. Iirc, I think they used the Elvish either when a character was trying to show a connection to elves (like when faced with angry elf sentries Aragorn would speak to them in Elvish to seem more like a friend) or to express more intimate feelings. Like in the scene in question, Elrond outlines the tragic consequences of his daughter marrying a mortal in Englsh, but the switches to Elvish to basically say, "And I really love you and want you to be happy." The Elvish was more intimate and was probably connected to her childhood.