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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?
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From:
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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.
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But I especially understand almost needing to swtich languages to get into the mindset of what you're saying, or describe things from that country. I think that's why I always prefer in movies when people actually speak the language and with subtitles when they go to other countries. Something like Sophie's Choice, I think, works better because the characters speak the language they would be speaking, even if as an English-speaker you feel just slightly left out knowing that the subtitles aren't giving you the exact flavor of things.
I'm sure languages do tend to have tendencies like prettifying or not, like you said about French...especially since it stands to reason that some cultures find some things more taboo than others. It's always surprising, for instance, when a word somebody uses a lot in one language translates into a word you would never say in our own, for instance. Or like the above posters said, where what people say in their own language in a certain situation translates to something that would be silly to say in English ("I like you a lot" instead of "I love you"). It's a direct translation, maybe, but with totally different associations.
And now I'm all interested in Ukranian vs. Russian and jealous of your background.:-)