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

[ackonrad.livejournal.com]

Other than my native language, I speak German, English and Spanish (although not as good as the other two, but good enough to speak and understand). And yes, I agree with your French friend - I personally find it easier to speak about certain things in a foreign language than in my own.

When I was 18, I visited Germany for the first time, and even though I spoke German well at that time, I still didn't speak it as good as I do now. I remember having a conversation about sexuality with a group of foreigners and a single German guy, and I remember using the word 'Muttermund' (which means uterine orifice in English - sorry if you already knew that) without blushing or without thinking that it was a big deal. The German guy was the only one who looked uncomfortable - the others regarded this word usage as normal as I did, except of the native speaker. It just sounds more harmless to use such words in another language, even though you know what they mean - it's a funny phenomena, but with the years spent here, I've only convinced myself that it's so.

The thing that horrifies me most, however, is the fact that I've started not to be able to express what I want to say in my native language - often, only the German or English word occur to me, or if the Bulgarian one occurs after all, I find it strangely sounding and completely inappropriate for what I want to say. It's horrible, because I remember that I used to laugh at my English teacher for having exactly the same problems in class then, and I mocked her because I thought that she'd just wanted to show off.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

First, I am flattered you'd think I'd know the German word for uterine orifice.:-)

But I completely understand just what you mean--I can well imagine being that German guy having a bunch of non-Native speakers throw around a word that just isn't used that easily. You know, I'd even suspect that if we all got together a lot of you guys would toss around words that I read all the time on the net and I'd be blushing! That's the whole thing about words in your native language is they just have that kind of power, like giving something its "real name" or something, while in another language it's more like a symbol of the real word. There's a scene in the movie Sophie's Choice, for instance where the character Stingo comes home late and has a drink with Sophie. She admires his suit, which is the type that's called a seersucker suit. She says, "You look very nice, you are in your cocksucker." Okay, it's an easy joke, but the whole thing is of course no native English-speaker could possibly make that mistake because that's not a word you're going to say by accident.

That's actually another interesting thing...the in-between language of someone struggling to communicate in a language they don't quite have. Like, let's say one was watching Sophie's Choice in Poland. The scenes in Polish would not need the subtitles they have now in English, but the English would need to be subtitled. Only if you subtitled Sophie's English speech you'd have to find some way of recreating the mistakes or you'd miss a big part of the character. I guess one movie that does that well is Love, Actually where Colin Firth's marriage proposal in Portuguese is translated literally so you see how little sense he makes.:-)

I mocked her because I thought that she'd just wanted to show off.

LOL! But of course it would be hard to imagine it happening unless you experienced it! Actually, that's even a weird thing in a way in HP fandom I have actually gotten used to English expressions (just as I'm sure a lot of non-Americans get used to American ones) and start to use them instead of what I would really say. The weirdest confession: I've gotten to where the word "pants" sounds wrong to me. It sounds like underwear and I want to say "trousers." But that would be so affected in American English. So I still say pants but after I say it I'll have a split second of weirdness. It's very strange.