Hyggelig

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!