Remember those several years of a foreign language you took in high school?
Of
course you do. You remember how difficult it was to learn an entirely
new way of perceiving, naming, and structuring thought that was entirely
distinct from and seemingly illogical compared to your mother tongue.
For
those of us with a native English tongue, it often seemed nonsensical
and a little bit sexist that some objects and ideas had a male gender
and other a female or even neutral gender. When we, as English speakers,
look at chairs, trees, or historical movements and talk about them, we
don't change our articles and our word endings to reflect any kind of
innate gender. Not only is the language itself foreign to us, the very
central concepts of the language are foreign and, in the opinions of far
too many who attempt to learn French, Spanish, German, Chinese, or
others, unnecessary and arbitrary.
Many of us who speak English
fluently see little point in learning a foreign language because many of
us pass through life only needing this universal language, and many of
us also rest upon the arrogant opinion that others around the world
should learn English because almost every corner of the world is
familiar with and employs English over its own native language as the
lingua franca (or should we say lingua angla?) of business, economics,
art, literature, communication, science, etc.
For those who
transitioned into English from one of these or the thousands of other
languages that populate the entire world, some declaring two or more
languages as a standard language for the media, publication, and
interpersonal relationships, this opinion is shallow and limiting. Yes,
it is very realistic and possible for someone living, for example, in a
Southern California suburb to only speak English to his or her friends,
family, coworkers, and colleagues and never utter a word of another
language his or her entire life.
But if you think English is enough,
listen to the people around you.
In Southern California, in the United
States, and around the world, you will rarely hear your own language
exclusively. In fact, the Anglophone world, including the United States,
Canada, England, and others where English is the dominant tongue, is
unique in its lack of diversity in its citizens' knowledge of languages
other than English.
If you think English is enough, then you are
cheating yourself of truly understanding one of the most beautiful
aspects of humanity: our countless ways of expressing ourselves. You are
cheating yourself of understanding writers, poets, scientists, and
culture makers in their own untainted method of conveying their
perceptions, knowledge, and wisdom.
As an illustration, imagine
Shakespeare, the English language's literary cornerstone. Though he is
taught almost ad nauseum in average middle school and high school
curriculum, many students dread tackling plays like
Romeo and Juliet or
Hamlet because
they find much of it incomprehensible to their own form of English and
often ignore the text itself, seeking Spark Notes' emotionally-gutted
commentary or, perhaps worse, using a side-by-side "translation" better
suited to their understanding as students removed from Shakespeare's
"English" by over 400 years. What's more frightening is that most of the
Shakespeare editions we use in school that we find difficult to
understand are themselves "translations," wiped clean of Elizabethan
colloquialisms and archaic spellings that would make even the most
fluent English reader woozy.
Shakespeare himself even reinterpreted
these plays from authors of other tongues, liberally borrowing from
Scandinavian, German, Italian, and Latin texts, and even though he may
have read many of these in English translation, hundreds of multilingual
scholars were arguably responsible for the success of the English
language's greatest figure.
But what made him truly
great in the English tongue was his depth, his insight, his wisdom, and
his unmatched characterization of human beings at their most noble,
their most evil, their most obedient, their most rebellious.
Now,
imagine how much of our own culture and idiom we are depriving
ourselves of when we refuse to read forms of English that do not line up
with our contemporary expression. If we treat our own language this
way, imagine the multitudes of languages and words we ignore simply
because we see it as "not useful."
Furthermore, some of the most
significant movements in the history and literature of English were
inspired by poets, writers, and philosophers of other cultures.
The
Enlightenment, out of which emerged a new respect and priority for the
ideas of science and inquiry, was brought into Anglo-American culture
through a multilingual interaction with the French, the Germans, and the
academic use of Latin, which was inspired centuries before by the
Italian Renaissance and the Catholic Church.
Without a familiarity with
other languages, our English-speaking forefathers and mothers may never
have brought democracy and a thirst for learning from the European
melting pot to the new worlds through figures such as David Hume, John
Locke, and the founders of the United States themselves.
Before I
start sounding like a textbook, what I'm getting at is that we, as
Americans, as Anglophones, as citizens of a global society, as readers,
as writers, as poets, as lovers, as friends, are limiting our potential
to understand the world in its most profound element.
Language existed
for thousands, perhaps millions, of years before an inventive
homo sapien thought
to record his or her inexpressible musings on the wall of a cave, and
to extend ourselves into the realms of other linguistic cultures and
perspectives is to come closer to understanding the origin of this
artistic urge to speak, to name, to declare, to encourage, to write, and
to articulate unspeakable emotions to which one's mother tongue simply
cannot do justice.
The title of this entry
illustrates the expressiveness of other languages to emotions for which
we have no expression. "Hyggelig" is a Danish word that implies
coziness, openness, community, and a welcoming atmosphere. The entire
Danish culture perceives itself using the nuances of this term...and
some people have written thousands of words about it.
http://www.hackwriters.com/Denmark.htm
And here's a collection of some more expression-bending words and phrases:
http://betterthanenglish.com/
Danke, Merci, Farvel!
