A friend of mine is a foul-mouthed dirty scoundrel when he speaks Portuguese with Brazilian friends (where he grew up for half his childhood), a normally-swearing Texan cowboy when he speaks with American friends (where he went to college), and a swear-words-have-never-touched-my-lips gentleman when he speaks received pronunciation with his British friends (other half of childhood in London).
He's the same person... but entirely different people.
Another anecdote, when I taught English in Brazil, I had one adult student, a lawyer, who was entirely serious and down-to-business with a deeper voice when speaking her native Portuguese, but in English she spoke like a little girl, at a much higher pitch, and a much sunnier personality.
But on the other hand, another very multi-lingual friend of mine is exactly the same person in every language -- same attitude, same swearing, same everything.
So not sure what it says about your personality... or personalities... :)
I believe, at least for your anecdotes, that this has less to do with language, and more to do with context.
We all speak (and behave) differently when we are with our parents, our colleagues and our friends - and arguably online, even when speaking in our native tongue in all these (and other) scenarios.
That is not to say that certain languages don't lend themselves better to certain forms of expression, but I'm not convinced your anecdotes support that argument.
Anecdote, but I speak Japanese and English both as native languages (learned them simultaneously growing up). I definitely have different personalities in each language, and can attest to both there contextual influences (working in bigcorp Jalan does things to you) and also that inherent influences of the language mechanisms. Japanese is grammatically and structurally built with a control and deference mechanism.
I also speak Japanese and English, but I learned Japanese while living in Japan in my 20's. Did you grow up in Japan or in a western country? I'm wondering if, as the blog post implies, that the situation/period in life in which you learn the language changes your personality in that language.
I grew up in California, in a household speaking Japanese at home, and going to two schools at the same time: one American school 5 days a week, one Japanese school all day Saturday following the Japanese government curriculum (it was mainly for students going back to Japan after their families' overseas work assignment was over).
All my friends were Japanese until middle school, and my social life was dominated by Japanese. Definitely didn't fit into American elementary school at all and was a problem student.
But then I stopped going to Japanese school in HS, and then figured out how to excel in American school, met likeminded friends for the first time, etc.
Then I went to work at a Japanese megacorp in my early 20's.
It's a strange mix of time spent using the language.
Do you like that you grew up getting to know two cultures, or do you wish it had been different? Growing up bilingual sounds super cool to me, but people who actually did it often tend to sound less excited about it.
In a vacuum, it's a net positive to be able to understand an additional language very well. But I've felt that my life would be easier in Japan if I were "more foreign", since I wouldn't be subjected to the expectations of a domestic person while actually internally being a foreigner.
Also I'm convinced that had I spent the resources that would put towards Japanese into English, I would have become much more proficient at English earlier in my life. That would have translated into better verbal test scores, and may have meant I wouldn't have had such a hard time in my younger years in school. Then again plenty of solo-English speakers of the shy nerd bretheren have problems at school of not fitting in, so this isn't only a language issue.
Honestly it's just a grass is greener type of situation. It's brought me great advantages (I wouldn't be doing my current company without this advantage, and I genuinely think the language is a beautiful and sonorous one, and the cultural traditions are admirable), but it's also held me back in many ways compared to my 100% American English peers as well.
> Japanese is grammatically and structurally built with a control and deference mechanism.
Practically every English speaker I know who speaks Japanese well has a HUGE mode shift when changing into and out of Japanese.
And it's oddly specific to Japanese. It doesn't seem to be a language difficulty issue as this doesn't seem to hold for the people who speak Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese) or Korean.
Not entirely. I swear a lot more in English than I do in (my native) Russian, even when audience and social context are the same. I'm pretty sure that's pure conditioning - Russian profanities literally make me wince every time, because that was drilled thoroughly into me as a kid. English ones got acquired much later, and are "just words".
I was at a meeting a couple years ago that got a bit intense. It was being done mostly in Hungarian but I was really struggling to follow since my Hungarian is so poor so a guy switched to English for me for a bit. But he was swearing so much I could feel myself getting really tense. If he was a native speaker I would be getting ready for fists to fly. I had to keep reminding myself that to him these were just more English words.
Agree.
As someone switching between Spanish, English and German (native) daily, it is for me at least mostly about context not language.
Not necessarily parents, colleagues, friends but cultural differences between countries/regions. I'm a Swiss living in Colombia. When I speak Spanish here my talking style differs quite a bit from home, because I'm adapting the local customs. But I'm still me. I can't think of anything I would do or not do, deem good or bad, just because I'm using another language.
Where language comes in is more in personally projection. Because of different forms of expression which are not 1:1 mappings and also because I'm not as eloquent as in my native tongue, you might think I have different personalities.
On the other hands I have several Finnish personality "traits" although I don't speak the language. But my mother is from Finland and I grew up with plenty influence of her culture.
I suspect, that if the language spoken has influence on the personality it is rather small or entirely emergent from the associated culture and time of life we learnt/used it.
I feel that to be true too. It's more that different languages correlate with a different context more than the language itself leads to a different understanding of things.
It's the old mistake of taking correlation for causation.
Is this really the different country with the different language, or "just" the other people?
As far as I know, everybody behaves differently towards old school friends than towards later friends, colleagues at work, their spouse, and so on.
How can we eliminate this effect? A study would need to observe the same group of people, all multilingual, in different langauges. It would be interesting to see whether these behave differently depending on the language (or mix of languages) they use.
But I personally doubt it. I believe it is "just" the people.
My own personal experience closely aligns with this.
I think of languages as musical instruments. Of course nearly anything can be played on nearly anything, but the character of each is entirely different, and the way one plays or composes for each is going to differ significantly.
I'm still me when speaking different languages, but each language I use is going to convey that differently, and bring out different sides of my nature.
Could you possibly be confusing speech patterns with personality traits? I.e., someone speaking in a girly high-pitched voice doesn't necessarily have or display a sunnier personality, it could be just your own perception. And that perception could potentially be wrong.
Isn't this what in linguistics people call 'code-switching'? It's a contextual and cultural thing. Just like when people go into formal settings like an interview for a white collar job, they tone down the swearing --but ight turn it up once they meet with colleagues at a bar.
That's one definition, but it has expanded into "Both in popular usage and in sociolinguistic study, the name code-switching is sometimes used to refer to switching among dialects, styles or registers" according to(1)
I think language might be piggybacking off cultural norms and expectations as well.
For example (generalization incoming) in Portugal the farther north you go, the looser tongues get. People from Lisbon (central Portugal) and down south are far more proper and don't curse as much.
English is the worlds most important language. 52.3% of websites pages are in English, the next highest percentage is Russian at 5.4%. People in other countries learn it just to study things not related to English, like Medicine.
The advantages gained by say a French speaker learning English are huge. An English speaker learning French, or even Mandarin? Really not so much. This attitude of "those Europeans are so much more intelligent than us, look at all the languages they know" really needs to die. They know English because they need it and it gives them an advantage. Or often just because they want to watch popular TV shows.
BTW English is the most commonly language spoken in Europe as well. The days of Europeans learning the languages of their neighbours is largely over; Norwegians and Swedes, Germans and Dutchmen are much more likely to converse in English than to know each others languages. In your hypothetical scenario, the person would have almost certainly tried the national language first, then English.
I stand corrected. I did know quite a few Danes who would use English to converse with their Northern neighbours. Either they were outliers, or I assumed the differences between the three big norse languages were roughly equal.
So, I am an American who lived in Sweden for roughly 4 years, long enough to consider myself mostly fluent (reading novels, talking about relatively high level political science questions in Swedish, etc.) and only agree partially with the comment above yours. Norwegians and Swedes would speak in their native tongues regularly but a lot of the time, especially if either person was from a region with a distinct accent (Skåne, i'm looking at you), they would transition to English.
As for Danes, that is a different boat. Their written language is extremely similar to Swedish but their pronunciation is far more guttural and hard to understand for many Swedes. I went to Copenhagen with a bunch of Swedes and they spoke almost exclusively English to the Danes.
"Scandinavian" languages, please. Or even mainland Scandinavian, to distinguish from the (not very mutually intelligible) insular Scandinavian in the Faroes and on Iceland.
> I did know quite a few Danes
That last word is the explanation. :-) More below.
> I assumed the differences between the three big norse languages were roughly equal.
Swedes and Norwegians have little trouble talking with one another in their own languages. Norwegian written language looks more similar to Danish (indeed, bokmål is highly similar) in that a Dane would have no trouble reading Norwegian or vice-versa. Written Swedish differs in more than just the last three letters of the alphabet.
Spoken Danish is a whole other animal. It works out when people try to speak as standardly as possible. Norwegians and Swedes (except some from the very south of Sweden) will struggle with ordinary spoken Danish, and are even likely to turn on subtitling when watching Danish TV shows (likewise there will be Danish subtitling of some Swedish shows).
In some technical settings you'll see more use of English among Scandinavians because there is a non-commonality of terms, and of course it is simply more polite to talk in English when talking someone whose only common language (or indeed only language) is English, and it is especially Danish to do so in order to avoid excluding anyone.
I already did give you a better source in my previous comment. Here's another that measures something slightly different. It took all of 10 seconds to google: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
China has nearly a billion regular internet users and there are over a hundred million overseas Chinese speakers. Finding a "source" on the internet is great and all but at least run it past a basic sanity check.
Given the enormous population gap, how could Russian possibly have more of an internet presence than Chinese?
I'm sorry but 2% is way off. Far more web sites than that are Chinese.
Your "stats" were calculated from total domains and the data from Alexa. While Alexa is good for the highest traffic sites, not that many Chinese internet users install an Alexa toolbar and not that many web masters install any of the tracking tools Alexa pulls from. The Chinese internet is fairly unique, has different search engines, has social media sites and has different analytics providers.
FWIW: I have worked in both US and Chinese tech companies and have familiarity with both ecosystems.
- I used a search engine to find the breakdown of websites by language, and quoted from it.
- You disputed it, telling me to look at the Alexa top 500 sites (which is a completely different stat).
- You then gave me another source, which is the language spoken by internet users. Again, a completely different stat.
- You now tell me that my source is useless, because the data is from Alexa - which a few minutes ago you were telling me was a better source of data (even though it was for a different stat).
- Now you're trying to convince me that the percentage of websites that are in Chinese is higher based on your feelings and intuition.
This is tedious. Either provide me with some concrete stats, or admit you don't know - but that you suspect it's higher.
I do know and I have read stats on it in Chinese and (I think) in English as well. I don't have time to do your research for you and to be blunt, it would be hard to interpret its credibility if you're unfamiliar with the Chinese online ecosystem. I've already explained the problem with the survey you shared (which was based on Alexa data from years ago).
If you are determined to believe that only 2% of all web content is in Chinese and that Italian and Portuguese are more common site languages, then so be it. I'm done on this thread.
Oh, you once maybe read some statistics somewhere in a language you can't remember that I wouldn't understand anyway because I'm "unfamiliar with the Chinese online ecosystem"?
Completely worthless.
I never said I didn't believe my data was flawed, or that I am determined to believe the 2% figure. But you have consistently failed to provide any evidence to the contrary.
OP had a link that proved you wrong, if you think you are right, either link somewhere else or just say your gut feeling is the original link is incorrect but can't prove it, stop linking totally off topic stuff it drives people nuts.
OP was incorrect in that the link is websites, not webpages though :)
> 52.3% of websites pages are in English, the next highest percentage is Russian at 5.4%
Quantity !== Quality
As someone who can read/write in three western languages, I trawl the relevant part of the internet for answers instead of being stuck on the English-speaking only or having to relying on still unreliable automated translators.
By the way a good share of the corpus for things like physics have been written in other language than english before english was the international trade language. So I guess there is an incentive to learn language like german, french or latin.
Not right now, I can easily see that being different within the next century though. Probably too late for us, but not for our children and grand children.
Why do you expect the language of a middle-income country with a rapidly aging population and unsustainable economic model to somehow become more useful in the next 100 years?
There's also the uncomfortable fact that many Chinese people just think it's funny that a foreigner speaks their language, or they feel like they have something over you because you have to talk to them on their terms.
In the next century, UN projections predict that the population of China will have dropped to 940 million, from its current value of 1,340 million. [1]
More immediately, Chinas population will peak in 15 years or so, which means its labour pool is already shrinking. Many East Asian countries are facing the same issue of course (South Korea, Taiwan) and Japan is dealing with it already. But these countries are all high income democracies - how will a middle income dictatorship deal with a rapidly aging population? How can they push through that to become even more economically productive, as you envision? I don't see it.
I don't know why so many people seem to extrapolate Chinas rise in the past few decades out indefinitely into the future. I don't see it ever becoming a high income country - at least not under its current system.
I'd say yes, but to some extent. My native tongue is Russian, but i'm also fluent in English. I often find myself cursing like a sailor in English (mostly in a group of close friends) while I find cursing in Russian absolutely disgusting. This is hard to explain, but when I say "fuck" and "shit" it really doesn't mean much to me because it isn't said in my native language. Somehow it doesn't register as me cursing the same way it does when I curse in Russian. If i do slip and curse in Russian i always catch myself right away and then feel bad about it for a few hours. I always found this weird and wonder if anybody else experiences it this way?
PS. It makes me wonder how much of it has to do with Russian cursing being more "colorful" for a lack of a better word and more diverse than in English. You can make a dictionary of Russian curse words which will rival English lol. I'm exaggerating of course, but it's a pretty massive vocabulary of vulgar terms.
Same situation here. My first language is Russian and i find myself using curse words more freely in English than I do in Russian. For some time it felt like following some kind of "double standard", but then I realized it has to do a lot with the differences in cultures and how it shapes the way we speak in different languages.
Words like "fucking" etc. are more engrained in everyday language and life in the English-speaking world and are used by mostly everyone. For instance, one of my professors who has a great sense of humour is known for dropping the f bomb during his lectures. This is always followed by the burst of laughter by us students. I cannot imagine the same situation and reaction happening with one of the Russian equivalents for F word if the university professor would use it publicly.
Russian curse words do sounds more rough and offensive to me, but I think it has to do with culture. I think there is a greater separation between the slang/curse language and "elevated" language in Russia than in the English-speaking world.
I am the same. I curse a lot in English and French (I live in Quebec) but I can't stand cursing in my native language. I always shared your theory too. I think we are somehow shielded from the cultural baggage of foreign swear words. They're just "funny" instead of offensive.
You're definitely not the only one, I've talked about this with friends and it's quite common, as far as I can tell.
I swear in my native language too, but I perceive it very differently in English. If someone calls me a "twat" or something like that, I'd probably not even register it. Also, I think of certain words (for example "nigger", "paki") like completely meaningless words, not that I ever used them.
Regarding your second paragraph: I find the English word "cunt" extremely interesting, because my own native languages (French and Portuguese) simply do not have any words that convey the level of offensiveness that seems to be communicated by it.
I guess this probably has to do with English speaking societies being, generally, way more prudish than French or Portuguese speaking societies.
In a translation course I took at university they told me that when translating subtitles from English to Swedish the translators often take a lesser curse word in Swedish, as it is perceived by Swedes that the equivalent word in Swedish is generally more offensive than its English counterpart. So I would say it is at least somewhat general that native curse words are perceived rougher than foreign.
And both languages have many curse words that technically mean the same thing.
I also got very weird looks from students in the US when I started cursing in English there... Like I was summoning a demonspawn.
That's interesting. In German, the equivalent word to an English curse word tends to be far less offensive (with a couple exceptions), usually to the point of being either totally innocuous or just slightly impolite.
It was funny to hear little kids and old ladies loudly swearing in English in regular conversation because the German equivalent wasn't offensive.
I found that the worse curse words in German were usually religion-oriented (crucifix!), and wouldn't even be considered remotely offensive in English.
There were consequences for swearing in my mother tongue. I’m not only talking about my own trespasses. You hear someone say a bad word, you can reasonably expect somebody voicing their problem with that. It’s social control. It changed me to have barriers when it comes to certain words.
There was no such opposition in my consumption of English language movies and music.
I think this is due to early childhood condition we received. You're also from a "good family", aren't you? The kind where swearing anywhere around adults would earn an immediate reprimand and lecture about good behavior, and you were told very early on that other kids who swear are bad apples?
You aren't alone - I'm a native English speaker, and when I was traveling in Germany I noticed that the Germans were far more liberal with their cursing in English than (as far as I could tell) they were when speaking German.
I lived and worked in France for two years in my early twenties and really made an effort to make good friendships with local French and try to adapt to and understand the culture. Once in awhile people would hear me speak to people back home in Canada on the phone and on several different occasions they commented to me that I speak much more loudly and boisterously in English. It was very unconscious to me.
In short, yes, speaking a different language can very much affect your personality. But it is not just the language, it is the culture that you express that language within, and also how the structure and vocabulary of that language itself reflects the culture in which it is used.
My favorite thing in France was when I would learn some new word or concept and I would "get" how to use it in French, but I couldn't fully and perfectly translate it to English because of how it just doesn't work quite the same within our culture.
e.g.: "C'est normal." It seems like an easy translation, but it requires a real understanding of the differences between French and English/American cultural views of conformity to really be able to see how it doesn't translate quite correctly. It means sort of "how things should be" or "as expected", but even that isn't quite correct, because the "should" is so implicit and assumed in a way that we don't assume in English.
Could c'est normal be translated "That's how it goes"?
I am not fluent in French, but I know that just because English has a word that looks like a Latinate one, it doesn't mean we use it the same way. In English, "normal" has two uses. First, it has a kind of insulting meaning, like "boring", "average", etc., as is often captured when people say things like "I don't want to be normal, I want to be unique." When we use it more straightforwardly, we tend to limit it to medical or scientific situations: "My blood pressure is normal." So it feels a little stiff.
Another thing to think about is whether a word's meaning is bent by its sound. In English, "normal" is stressed on its first syllable. NORmul. It kind of just stops there and stands, boringly. But isn't in French it stressed on the second syllable? NurMAAAAAL. It kind of trails off, and by doing so, seems at least to me to convey the meaning of "Oh whatever, c'est la vie, that's just how it goes". So you have to use an English word that also trails off, like goes.
This article doesn't really go into what the title suggests so much as it explains that we prefer languages for different reasons. The author talks about several of her students that chose not to use their native language to write because of their negative associations with the language.
"For me, language was a kind of initiation into multiple realities."
This is how I feel about learning a second language. I feel that I'm opening a door to a land of adventure that had previously been closed.
You are very right. After learning the third, you start to feel a glimpse of some more universal structure in your brain, that pinpoints meaning to expression in languages you know. So you can tell "this cant be said in English, it is too Spanish", or something like that. And it is very useful to learn at least one Eastern Asian language with non-latin script, to get full experience of this kind. Your own depths are unfathomable, and every language pulls the cover, unraveling the abyss of your own mind.
> And it is very useful to learn at least one Eastern Asian language with non-latin script, to get full experience of this kind.
I find learning Han characters the height of tedium. I'll happily deal with any non-latin phonetic alphabet - but logograms do my head in. There's very little insight to be gained there IMO.
Do you know a substantail number of Indians speak atleast 3 languages. 1st is their regional language where they were born, another is Hindi and the third is English. And it's not considered out of the ordinary at all..
Maybe what you're saying is true, but I work for an Indian IT consulting company in Europe and from my experience Indians with IQ > 120 (or even > 100) are extremely hard to come by.
IQ is ortoganal to education; a person with high IQ with a good round education will probably excel while two people with no education or an education that lacks certain aspect will probably not be so different.
Personal anecdote: My mother tongue (Persian) is very complicated when it comes to conveying respect to strangers. You need to be very careful to use the right terms and exchange obligatory niceties. That's why I often try to hide my mother tongue when interacting with fellow Iranians. For instance, it's a lot easier to order food at an Iranian restaurant in English than Persian. English just means business.
In Sweden, there was a campaign to drop titles and respectful pronouns in the late 1960s, and instead use "du" - "you" or "thou" rather - the singular form, which was considered impolite.
It worked out to be a success, and when I was a kid in the 80s I can't remember anything else than the new system, except perhaps on film and maybe by some rather old conservatives.
Interestingly, and somewhat both ironically and telling, younger people, those younger than 30 perhaps, have reinvented a NEW formal address ("Ni" [you]) that was previously considered to be rather rude. I must say that although I'm not old enough to really know the old system, I still get a bit annoyed by just that failed attempt to be polite.
I speak an Eastern European language. I know exactly what you mean.
I suspect all this linguistic baggage slows down communication and must have some impact on business. Compare it to English - it's so much easier to just get things done when you speak it.
languages where you can convey respect by certain forms of words and its inherent link with social status or superiority are a pain to get the initial social coordination. cause you're judging and gauging consistently on how to play it especially with strangers.
Frickin' Japanese. There are some social customs that tie into this: when two salarymen meet for the first time, the first thing they do is wordlessly exchange business cards, so that the right honorifics, registers, verb forms, and such can be used depending on who outranks whom.
Korean language has built-in social framework for respecting the elders. Different words used when speaking to someone older vs. younger. The language enforces filial piety.
When I learned German, French and Spanish I struggled with gender specific features in them.
When I learned English, I struggled and still struggle with the use of articles, like the "the".
Languages reflect and reinforce culture and mindsets. I am a different person in each language.
Reading translated books is a great mental and cultural exercise.
Elena Ferrante reads better in English than the original Italian.
Jhumpa Lahiri reads better in English than Italian.
Well, yes, and it's a pain in the ass, and I say that as a native Korean speaker who wholeheartedly loves my own language.
To see why, consider that in Korean schools, people use different registers when talking to someone one grade older. There are situations like "Joon is one year senior to me, but he's actually friends with my friend Min, who entered this college a year before me, and Joon was born on January of 1980 while I was born on November 1979; so how should I address him?"
(And it certainly contributes to the large number of old male asshats who think they can treat a store clerk like his personal servant, just because the clerk is forty years younger.)
The sooner we get rid of this ridiculous system, or at least drastically simplify it, the better, IMHO.
Many languages have the sigular vs plural "you" distinction that is heavily used to indicate degrees of social standing and/or respect, that are utterly lacking in English. When you come to English from those languages, it sounds very blunt and disrespectful initially.
Russian also uses names for this purpose, since we have first + last + patronymic, various combinations of those when addressing someone denote various degrees of familiarity and deference. E.g. first + patronymic is respect for authority or seniority (but sometimes used jokingly); last name alone is very impersonal; first name + plural you is respectful while asserting equal authority; and first name + singular you indicates a more personal relationship (friend or at least close acquaintance). Some combos, like last name + singular you, are outright insulting in and of themselves - curiously, historically that was the combo used by aristocracy to address inferiors. And as conversation develops, it's not uncommon for people to start with the most formal form of address, and gradually dial it down by mutual consent, often implicit.
And, because of all this, addressing someone by name repeatedly over the course of the conversation is more common in Russian than it is in English - because of all that extra meaning attached to it.
It is not that rigorous in Russian, though. "First name + patronymic" combination is often used among equals (supposedly equally qualifed/approx. same age group) as a matter of style or tradition, which engineering or research bureaus are especially known for. I've personally encountered such usage in university and in a factory IT departments; my friend, working as mechanical engineer in a big industrial complex, has the same observation. However, despite the inclusion of patronymic, personal pronouns tend to be singular in that case. Such style of referencing perhaps lies between full-blown formal interaction and a joking context as in a casual speech.
Another subtlety is an explicit and implicit addressing style unification among unequal participants.
I. [explicit] When you are referring to superior, using the aforementioned "f.n.+patronymic", he is expected to return you in the same way, even (or especially...) in the case of student-professor interaction.
II. [implicit] You are still expected to use formal addressing, when addressed informally by superior - but when that expectation holds, it is actually considered unacceptable, or bad style at least, for superior to use such addressing; unless you're in the student-professor relationship with the superior, or you're working in some shitty-unwitty paperstocking dogfood reselling organization, or you're unskilled/simple-skilled labour in a government institution.
Rephrasing, superior should make sure that you both use the same addressing style (ie. as in I.).
I speak four languages (English, Bengali (mother-tongue), Hindi fluently and Lao semi-fluently). I just find that every language has some specific quality of expression that is unique to it and hence when you use that language to its maximum potential, you are expressing a side of you that you could not express in another language.
My speech is much more colorful (I don't mean in a dirty foul-mouthed way) in Bengali than any of the other languages I speak - I can express nuances while maintaining a style that I cannot in another language I speak without losing either the style or the nuance. I find Hindi is also very expressive that way. For the lack of a better word, I feel I'm unable to be equally "juicy" in English. Of course, I'm not a native English speaker so probably the limitation is me and not the language.
I'm a native speaker of both Bengali and English, and my experience matches yours. Out of curiosity, which dialect of Bengali do you speak?
Separately, something I've long found interesting: sarcasm (the way we understand the concept in English) doesn't really come across in Bengali. I don't mean that Bengali people are incapable of sarcasm, but almost invariably, the Bengali speakers I know only make sarcastic comments in English, never in Bengali.
Or, to put it more accurately: there is a way of expressing ironic sentiment in Bengali, but it's very different from how we'd think of it in English, both textually and in the delivery.
I was born and brought up in a Hindi speaking state so my learning of Bengali, apart from being mother tongue, is based on reading copious amount of books/magazines/comics etc. I speak mostly the "Calcutta" dialect + the "kehlum/gelum" sustituted with "khelaam/gelaam" etc (though I can break out in broken "bangaal" should the need arise). I've also noticed that though I immensely enjoy Bengali literature, I have an inherent tendency to shun overly emotional/flowery words typically used in West Bengal - not sure if it is a personality trait or due to upbringing in a less "soft" Hindi-centric environment or due to being part of a family with East Bengal origins.
Regarding sarcasm: I think it is pretty stinging in Bengali if you are using the power of old/rural idioms/phrases (you can find numerous examples in works of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay or contemporary 1900-1930s literature where the characters are in a confrontational setting). I also grow up in company of my grandparents so I learned a bunch from them. They are concise, entertaining and leave the target squirming if well used. However I think that in today's urban Bengali society, you are considered unsophisticated if you use them so we are losing such an interesting aspect of Bengali.
I speak 3 languages (English, Hindi, Tamil) and know what you mean. May I ask how you picked up Lao, and how similar/dissimilar it is to say Hindi or Bengali?
My wife is Lao :) Because I'm only semi-fluent (or lets say, I can do my shopping and hold basic small talk in it), I'm not in a good position to do a competent comparison. However, I feel is that is a to the point language. There is a fairly good amount of re-use of words. Also, it being tonal you have to be careful because unlike Hindi/Bengali, wrong tone _will_ change the meaning. Thankfully, people on my wife's side are very kind and forgiving so I survive the blunders I do :)
I shared room with two Lao students during my university years. I know that their script is very different from Bengali. How difficult was for you to learn to read Lao?
Something along similar lines, I am not very comfortable in using cuss words in my native language whereas I feel less compunction in using cuss words in languages I have learned. In general I swear rarely, but when I do feel like swearing I feel it easier to do so in learned languages. Probably with my native language the cuss words trigger a stronger emotions, and making their usage repugnant (for me).
It's the reverse for me. In fact, in the society where my mother's native tongue is the dominant language, it's the social norm to be reserved and "on your guard" vs. other people, to not show any weaknesses or be too candid.
In English or Japanese, I feel liberated and free to say what's on my mind. So I definitely agree with this article's premise. I do believe that the feel, tone, nuances and the "taste" of a language defines its adopting culture and society, more than the other way around.
> “River” in Polish was a vital sound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of my rivers, of my being immersed in rivers. “River” in English is cold—a word without an aura. It has no accumulated associations for me, and it does not give off the radiating haze of connotation. It does not evoke.”
This is how I feel about foreign languages as well. Things don't feel as "heavy" somehow. In my native language, official things sound very official, strict and serious, in English it's just the meaning, factually.
Or for example when I read English technical (CS, math) books it evokes the same feeling that I took from Numberphile, or online tutorials etc, while the equivalent book in my language would sound and smell like school and obligations instead of exciting and fun things.
Yes. In my opinion, entirely. I'm also a believer that how one chooses to speak impacts their behavior and ultimately how they think (of themselves and others).
People who speak negatively tend to be negative people. I find the opposite to be true as well, as long as the speech is genuine. Someone "faking" their optimism could of course be a really negative person, regardless of how they speak. I think believing what you say plays a big role.
I find myself complimenting others and thanking people for things more frequently in Japanese. Not just as a formality - but because it seems so much more natural than in English.
And I think it is very important that any person who speaks only one language does their best to embrace another culture and learn a second. It will change how you think about many things.
From a neurological point of view -- quite possibly yes.
In that, as one becomes fluent in new language, different centers of the brain (perhaps entirely different from those used for developing one's mother tongue) are activity. And literally new brain tissue grows in these regions. So when these newer centers are activated... in part, it's literally a different "you" that's being engaged.
Just another among the many side benefits of becoming bilingual.
Interesting article, but very one-sided. Yes, there are a great many ways people are different when they switch languages. But the basic realities of human existence, like being bodies that have to eat and so on to survive, and living in a three-dimensional world, and, are still basically the same. Oh, and that is why it is possible to translate, imperfectly but still to a great extent, between different languages.
It however asks an important question about our internal wiring. During the lat two years I started to think that our wetware runs different AIs, when we think in different languages.
This made me laugh. For a long time, I felt like I could only speak like a child using Norwegian (my second language). It has improved, but there are things I still can't properly express.
I speak two languages fluently: English and Russian with English being my mother tongue.
I find when people speak a language other than their mother tongue, their voice is higher from the concentration it takes to make the second language. Also, I do agree--when you speak a language your personality is affected by the culture of the language you're speaking. One personality for English, another for Russian--in my case.
> I find when people speak a language other than their mother tongue, their voice is higher from the concentration it takes to make the second language.
Huh! I've wondered about this. I'm male, and my voice is much higher when speaking my girlfriends language - who unsurprisingly has a higher pitched voice than me. I figured it was just because I mimic her to pronounce things, but that actually makes sense as well.
I find this funny. I've been told my voice sounds nice when I speak Norwegian, despite the errors (I don't think I'm fluent yet). I always somewhat assumed it was due to Norwegian being nearly song-like compared to English, but you might be onto something with the higher pitch.
ROTFL. This is translation not from Sanskrit, but from Traditional Chinese. Dude, you really need to learn some languages. Try Russian. Latvian has many words taken from Russian in 19th century.
> You will simply have no words to express what you need
That is a challenge that all translators face, no matter the language pair. There are no direct equivalents of "अभिधर्म" or "Ānanda" in any of the Western languages either, be it Latvian, English or Welsh. Incidentally, both Lithuanian and Latvian happen to be closer to Sanskrit than the latter. Again, I don't quite see the point you're making. Care to elaborate?
You said it yourself - the lack of direct equivalents is nothing special. What is amusing however, is how in some languages you'll find a lot of "untranslatables" grouped around a particular concept or theme. Language X may have a curiously large amount of untranslatable words that have to do with describing how one feels, while language Y may have a plethora of quick, informal words and phrases that are very hard to translate.
Languages borrow words from neighbours, just as peoples get influences from neighbouring peoples, so it is hardly a surprise that Latvian language has Slavic words - and Russian language has borrowed lots from neighbours, as well as substantial amount of words from English, German and French languages. Not just in 19th century, but for the past 1000 years; a significant impact to Russian language was during the time of Peter the Great when cultural opening brought lots of new words.
Indeed, there are so many words of French and German origins in the Russian language, that linguists have lost their count. This is to do with the Russian nobility, at different periods, helming from those countries and/or it being the language of the court at the time (same as with French in England, however briefly). There is no shame in borrowing. Good languages copy, great languages steal.
I don't even really know Russian, I've never studied it; but I have learned the alphabet, and I can typically understand some part of newspaper articles etc simply because there are so many loan words from languages I know (English, German, Swedish and Finnish).
Yup, silly it is. I made a survey of preferential by understanding term for "widget" in Russian among Russian businessmen this January, and got about 90% "pro" votes for using the borrowed English term. Practical people do not care for "purity".
FWIW, Latvian is also more related to Russian than most other non-Slavic European languages, since both languages belong to the same top-level subdivision within Indo-European (Balto-Slavic).
Please stop posting uncivilly to HN. Several of your comments are interesting but that doesn't make it ok to be rude. We ban accounts that do that repeatedly.
Why, thank you, I speak Russian fluently. It doesn't matter whether the text has been translated from Traditional Chinese or Sanskrit, the issue remains the same: Buddhist terminology is specific to the Buddhist tradition. You will face the same challenge, as long as the language that it is being translated to is not steeped in the same tradition.
You have a lot to discover in original Buddhism before making statements like that. I am fascinated and struggling with help of Roerich's Tibetan-English-Russian dictionary, and I must say, there is difference in meanings, whether its sutra in Chinese or Tibetan. Ancient translators had their own problems, and direction of tradition is more like India -> Tibet -> China. So Sanskrit originals prevail, and I am yet to learn the script.
I am talking about the general principle of translating a text with developed and precise terminology that is steeped in tradition for which no reference point exists in the language-of-destination. Therefore, it matters very little whether we're talking about translating ancient Chinese or Tibetan texts. The challenges are similar in scale. Case in point[1]:
"This is a major reason why the Daodejing, to take a famous example, is impenetrable to a few, enigmatic to many more, and highly allusive for everyone, and has been the subject of well over 150 translations of it in English alone."
Not much, since I came to Tibetan from English, and a course in Russian delivered by Mongolian and Tibetan native speaker. I can give a funny example on how difficult it is to keep conveyance of meaning in translation.
Tibetan རང་དབང is translated to English as "independence", when in fact it is itself translation of Sanskrit स्वतन्त्रः, which is in fact "self-empowering reliance", a bit different thing.
Latvian for "independence" is "neatkarība" which itself is wrong pair, because "independence" means not being dependent, and therefore free, while Latvian word means more like "impossibility to take by force". So it might be incorrect to use it in translating Tibetan term. What may be more suitable is to use 'patvaldība', but it is more about power, than reliance.
> Latvian for "independence" is "neatkarība" which itself is wrong pair, because "independence" means not being dependent, and therefore free, while Latvian word means more like "impossibility to take by force".
"Ne" is a negation (= "in" or "not"), whereas "atkarība" is simply "dependence". Thus, (in)(dependence) is the equivalent of (ne)(atkarība). I don't see where you got it to mean "impossibility to take by force". Independence can be lost, it's not an impossibility. Source:
OK. 'Atkarība' is literally state of land that one can 'atkarot', i.e. take back by force.
In old money being "atkarīgs" literally means being the one whose land was taken by force. Its a Normann to Saxon situation in a way.
> Latvian for "independence" is "neatkarība" which itself is wrong pair, because "independence" means not being dependent, and therefore free, while Latvian word means more like "impossibility to take by force".
Interesting, the Latvian word feels like a cognate of Russian непокорённость (nepokoryonnost'), which means something like "ability to resist conquest". I wonder if kor/kar is the same Balto-Slavic root, or is this a false cognate?
Calque of German abhängig (“dependent”), coined at the end of the 19th century from atkār(t) (“to hang down”) + -īgs (with atkārt from at- + kārt (“to hang”)), together with the related term atkarība.
The word for independence ("neatkarība") in Latvian is a calque from the German Abhängigkeit ("dependence")[1]. Thus, "atkarāties" and "karāties" ("to hang"). Thus, the English expression "it hangs in the balance". On balance, most of the things you've said about the Latvian language in this thread hang by a thread, and that thread is close to tear.
Please check your sources and brush up on whatever rudimentary Latvian skills you still posses. You will certainly not master the language by defaulting to what is, in essence, chauvinism. Rest assured, we can read between the lines of what you're implying ["Russian language superior! We have big words, words for everything! The best words!], but it's just not gonna fly here.
This is beyond the pale and we warned you repeatedly, so this account is now banned. I hate to ban anyone who posts as interestingly as, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9908878, but poison like this leaves no choice.
As a Latvian speaker, I must say, that particular language is very poor in expressing abstract concepts and expressing suspense. The language was quite literally designed by Germans as 'slave language'. It had major redesign in 20-ies, but surprisingly most of books in Latvian were published during Soviet times. I agree with hero, Latvian is 'sweet'. It is very good in expressing practical concepts, and as daily conversational speak is much more 'positive' than Russian or English with their multitude of meanings behind simple expressions.
UPD: Example of sweet positive character of Latvian. Latvian for "How do you do?" is "Ka labi iet?", means literally the same, but asking person is also telling that he is sure that everything is OK and somehow cheers up spirits of the respondent in this short expression.
UPD2: For those native Latvian speakers who care to read Russian and they are many, here is study summing up the first 400 years of Latvian books https://dspace.lu.lv/dspace/bitstream/handle/7/2152/Konferen... And you know, in 1956 there were 7.9 million books printed in Latvian language (!). Quite a figure for a nation of 2.5 mln people.
As a native Latvian speaker, I have no idea what you're talking about. In comparison to other languages spoken on the European continent, Lithuanian and Latvian have retained more of the features of what linguists call Proto-Indo-European (PIE), a language spoken circa 3500 BCE. It was certainly not "designed by Germans as 'slave language'". Perhaps that's what you were taught during the "ommunist" times under the Soviet occupation. Incidentally, this was also a time of Russification[1], i.e., marginalization of languages spoken by the native population. You can see how this would fit nicely into their narrative. Latvian speakers today, though, would really appreciate if people could stop spreading such falsehoods. That'd be really nice too, Jevgēnij.
This is bullshit. I spoke about it with Edgar Leitan, who is native Latvian speaker, born in Rezekne, and is Professor of linguistics specializing in oriental languages, in Vienna University. Ask him yourself. http://edgar-leitan.livejournal.com
Latvian as a language never lived better under the USSR, because Russian revolution performance was much ensured by Latvian soldiers hired by Lenin, and that was never forgotten. Among the highest Soviet officials there always been Latvians. Boris Pugo being the last.
Learn your own history from professionals, not from tabloids full of hate speech.
UPD: By the way, its Latgalian that is PTE. Latvian is simplified Latgalian. It may look as a bit of exagerration, but truth is worth discovery.
(Disclaimer: I'm not Latvian. I just happen to speak the language rather well, run a small business in Riga and spend about 1/3 of my time there.)
"Latvian as a language never lived better under the USSR". I've seen such a rich cultural heritage from the Latvian Soviet Republic era. Have a look at wonderful things like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kzsO_w8XIQ . Often a very poor cultural landscape afterwards.
And clearly there is a minority of Russian speaking people in Riga neither able nor willing to speak even the most basic Latvian. Clearly, there are idiots on the Latvian speaking side too. I'll spare you the anecdotes.
But when it comes to cursing, they all seem to use Russian :-)
> I spoke about it with Edgar Leitan, who is native Latvian speaker, born in Rezekne, and is Professor of linguistics specializing in oriental languages, in Vienna University.
Nothing personally against him, but "South Asian, Tibet and Buddhist Studies" is pretty far from Indo-European linguistics. Also, it's not unusual that native speakers have craziest ideas about their own languages. You don't automatically gain a deep insight into the history of your language just by being a native speaker.
Indeed, Latvian is a somewhat formalized version of Latgalian, so I'm not sure how that can be "truth worth discovery [sic]". If you haven't kept up with news back home, it might be of interest to you that there are MPs in the Parliament that are delivering their swear-in ceremony speeches in Latgalian now. More power to them. The rest of your comment, however, is a non sequitur.
We are a bit offtopic, but you may know that you cannot write down Latgalian identity in the Latvian national passport. Latgalians are prohibited to officially exist in Latvia 2.0.
And you very well can fix officially your Latgalian identity in Russia, surprise! Isn't it strange?
I don't find it strange at all, it plays very well into the "divide and conquer" approach to ethnic politics that Russia has put to use both in the past and more recently in Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova and elsewhere. For what it's worth, I disagree with there being ethnic markings in the Latvian Passport to begin with. I am in complete favor of removing them, not least because it would prevent Russian state from winning such cheap propaganda points.
Are the main characters in books, plays and movies called "heroes" in Latvian? I ask because it is so in Polish. In English a book has a protagonist, while in Polish it's the "bohater" ("hero") of the book.
I'm very intrigued by what you're saying, but can't imagine it. What makes it easier to express practical concepts? How is it more positive than others? How are others better at expressing suspense, and abstract concepts?
Learn Latvian, than Tibetan. Than try to translate a piece of classic buddhist text to Latvian. You will simply have no words to express what you need.
UPD: On other side of the coin, translation of iPad user instruction from English to Latvian is a breeze. All terms meet their pairs in translation.
@tikums. Of course they are. Read Aurobindo Ghosh, for English equivalents. I know, its a popular Latvian meme, that Latvian is close to Sanskrit.
A friend of mine is a foul-mouthed dirty scoundrel when he speaks Portuguese with Brazilian friends (where he grew up for half his childhood), a normally-swearing Texan cowboy when he speaks with American friends (where he went to college), and a swear-words-have-never-touched-my-lips gentleman when he speaks received pronunciation with his British friends (other half of childhood in London).
He's the same person... but entirely different people.
Another anecdote, when I taught English in Brazil, I had one adult student, a lawyer, who was entirely serious and down-to-business with a deeper voice when speaking her native Portuguese, but in English she spoke like a little girl, at a much higher pitch, and a much sunnier personality.
But on the other hand, another very multi-lingual friend of mine is exactly the same person in every language -- same attitude, same swearing, same everything.
So not sure what it says about your personality... or personalities... :)