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]

Like I said above, that just amazes me, that when you say there isn't an expression in Tamil that's really used, that you mean people literally say the English. But it makes sense, too, that it's not quite the same as saying it in English since it's not always used in the context English-speakers would use it. There's probably a lot of expressions in English like that too (that are from another language but have been made part of English) but after a while people don't even really notice them.

Yes, this discussion is so cool! And makes me more determined to be better at languages. I'm so jealous of people who have a knack for them.

[ringwraithe.livejournal.com]

The coming of English killed the Tamil expression of love :-/ It's like...three syllables versus fifteen, or something. I don't speak very good Tamil, so I'm rather lost. They use a lot of English words for stuff that isn't there in Tamil knowledge and culture, and so doesn't have a word. Hee, their pronunciation of 'love' is so cute.

Yeah, restaurant and cafe are French, to quote a few very common examples. Eee, I wish I was better at languages, too. I think I'm the only one of the family too lazy to learn them well :-/