Speaking in tongues

[sistermagpie]

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?

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I was watching a documentary that was showing just what you described about Asian societies and languages switching--sometimes it was even English words but with suffixes attached that came from the native language. In this show they talked about how English was now more of a universal language, like French and Latin once were, and said how whenever this happened somebody tried to explain how the language in question had something about it to make it easier for others to speak it. But the reality, of course, was that the language in question was just connected to more advantages. It was the dominant language in finance and power and business.

Most of the time, however, I switch between languages frequently and without noticing it; that's probably one of the advantages of having several up my sleeve, because the total combination leaves me less restricted when I have things to say

That's exactly what it seems like--and now I am fascinated about this idea of Asian "I love you's." :-) Like I said, the woman in my class said she was more comfortable expressing her feelings in English--but her native language is French which is called "the language of love," so it's probably not for the same reasons. I don't think Je t'aime or Je t'adore are as little-used as their Asian equivalents. At first I couldn't imagine not having an expression in your own language for the phrase, but then I realized using an English expression just made it part of the language. There are lots of words in English that are taken from other languages, of course, but it's cool to know where they really come from, especially when the meaning changes a little.

[anoni.livejournal.com]

I have a whole stack of quotes dealing with why people favoured English, and yes, advantages are pretty much everything. There was an outcry in Hong Kong when they switched to teaching in Cantonese, and the schools permitted to continue in English were immediately sought after. But as a language, English can be painful to learn. I would suck at explaining why without a proper set of terminology, but a linguistics freak/friend (who's spent years in Latin, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese and obviously English) constantly pulls his hair out at English, so I trust his authority even though I cannot quote his arguments.

The Japanese use 'I love you', and it crops up quite frequently in Mandarin. Cantonese is the taboo zone, probably at least partially to do with how much the spoken version deviates from the written. When I look at Hong Kong serials, for example, shockingly few of them actually have the Chinese equivalent of 'I love you' anywhere, despite the premise being love triangles or what have you. It's simply more of a written phrase than one that feels natural when spoken. They tend to use 'I like you' or 'I like you a lot' or 'I have feelings for you' at the start of relationships, but 'I love you' appears rarely.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

It's so hard to try to wrap my mind around this...I mean, I understand it, but it's hard since I can only imagine it in English. But I'm sure there are expressions in other languages where the English equivalent would sound just as odd because we didn't have one. I'll bet there's a lot of people sure "I love you" is completely universal.