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]

Wow--that was a great monster post covering all sorts of language-switching things. I love that I now have this picture of your family switching languages when kids are present.:-)

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.:-)