Wonderful Melissa! I agree with much of what you say. Esoterically English is known as The Liars Language. The best language for lawyers. One of the reasons is (told to me by a lawyer) you can change your position easily in English. Example: Do or Don't, huge difference but when spoken hard to tell the difference. Often if people say this word or a word like it I usually then ask for clarity: excuse me did you say do or don't.
Esoterically also each letter has a different numerology # and if you notice names which start with for example A or J have more energy/power to them though there is more to it than that. Consider: Jesus, John, James etc.
Ha! I'd never heard that before. That makes a lot of sense, actually, especially when compared to a language like Latin, where entire words change based on whether you're saying do or don't. The romance languages might fall somewhere in between?
Interesting about the numerology thing! There's a book on our shelf called "The English Cabala" that I've never cracked open. Maybe today's the day...
This was a delightful little hike into the language of my birth. The English language is robust enough to satisfy all my verbal wanderlust as I find profound word gardens right here in my back yard. I sometimes wonder what a pun looks like in another language. Still, regardless of the spoken tongue, all words are metaphors.
“ This is kind of an Orwellian idea, also. I don’t remember which essay this comes from, but Orwell wrote somewhere that English people were not as artistic as the rest of Europe. Countries such as France and Italy excelled at painting and music, while the English contributions to these arts were unimpressive. However, the one art in which the English reigned supreme was literature. Englishmen were very good writers.”
I spent much time performing in Europe. I find it true that the English were less creative overall than the French, Italian Germans and Spanish when it came to imagination. And I absolutely agree about the literature, although I’m biased because English is the only language I’m completely fluent. Thank you for this Melissa, I am inspired to study Anglo-Saxon words.
Interesting!! I’m glad to hear this confirmed—I’ve sadly spent very little time outside of the US, so while it definitely sounded like Orwell was onto something here, I have no way of knowing.
The “native language bias” is definitely an interesting thing to think about. It’s possible that other languages can achieve just as much as English at their higher levels, which we just can’t understand because we don’t have that level of fluency. Still, I like to think what I said is true, even though I’m aware it could be absolutely wrong.
Thanks for your comment. I’ll be looking up the roots of every English word for weeks!
The opposite, actually—I'm trying to learn some Latin. I have a vague dream of reading the classics in their original language. Whether I stick to it, we'll see.
Oh, I forgot, dammit. You already mentioned this. Hey, just wait for John to finish with his Italian, and then downgrade it down to to Latin. Actually, it's the other way around, isn't it? Latin was downgraded over and over, into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, French, etc.
And English! I find it pretty interesting that we got some of our 'downgraded Latin' from Latin itself, but also indirectly from French, which was basically already-downgraded Latin.
I wonder if it was an improvement. Latin is exhausting! The grammar of Latin and all the other Romance languages is much more straightforward.
There are certainly people who'd reflexively dismiss this as chauvinism. I'm not one of them. And I hate, hate, hate studying foreign languages, and I always did.
That having been said: the very fact that I can't read any other language at all well means that I can't really judge if we have the best language. I cannot tell if reading Anna Karenina in the original Russian is better than reading Constance Garnett's translation, because I can only do the latter.
As for beauty: I've often thought that an experiment could be done with newborns, similar to the ones where they measure the intrinsic attractiveness of faces by how long the babies look at them. You could play recordings of people speaking a language which the baby has never heard, from a different part of the world, and record their reactions, i.e. for an African baby you'd be sure to play Asian languages; for an Asian baby, European languages, etc.
This would give you some idea which languages are pleasing in a culturally-independent way. Probably the results would be career-ending for whatever professors published them, since no one wants to hear that they have the ugliest language in the world.
Wonderful Melissa! I agree with much of what you say. Esoterically English is known as The Liars Language. The best language for lawyers. One of the reasons is (told to me by a lawyer) you can change your position easily in English. Example: Do or Don't, huge difference but when spoken hard to tell the difference. Often if people say this word or a word like it I usually then ask for clarity: excuse me did you say do or don't.
Esoterically also each letter has a different numerology # and if you notice names which start with for example A or J have more energy/power to them though there is more to it than that. Consider: Jesus, John, James etc.
Ha! I'd never heard that before. That makes a lot of sense, actually, especially when compared to a language like Latin, where entire words change based on whether you're saying do or don't. The romance languages might fall somewhere in between?
Interesting about the numerology thing! There's a book on our shelf called "The English Cabala" that I've never cracked open. Maybe today's the day...
This was a delightful little hike into the language of my birth. The English language is robust enough to satisfy all my verbal wanderlust as I find profound word gardens right here in my back yard. I sometimes wonder what a pun looks like in another language. Still, regardless of the spoken tongue, all words are metaphors.
All words are metaphors, and there's nothing better than a well-chosen one (I like 'word gardens' a lot).
Is writing about writing creating metaphors about metaphors?
Also, completely agree about puns. And idioms!
👍
“ This is kind of an Orwellian idea, also. I don’t remember which essay this comes from, but Orwell wrote somewhere that English people were not as artistic as the rest of Europe. Countries such as France and Italy excelled at painting and music, while the English contributions to these arts were unimpressive. However, the one art in which the English reigned supreme was literature. Englishmen were very good writers.”
I spent much time performing in Europe. I find it true that the English were less creative overall than the French, Italian Germans and Spanish when it came to imagination. And I absolutely agree about the literature, although I’m biased because English is the only language I’m completely fluent. Thank you for this Melissa, I am inspired to study Anglo-Saxon words.
Interesting!! I’m glad to hear this confirmed—I’ve sadly spent very little time outside of the US, so while it definitely sounded like Orwell was onto something here, I have no way of knowing.
The “native language bias” is definitely an interesting thing to think about. It’s possible that other languages can achieve just as much as English at their higher levels, which we just can’t understand because we don’t have that level of fluency. Still, I like to think what I said is true, even though I’m aware it could be absolutely wrong.
Thanks for your comment. I’ll be looking up the roots of every English word for weeks!
I could swear I was already subscribed to Rob Watts' YouTube channel, but I wasn't. Thanks. So, John is dabbling in Italian, and you? Anglish, or...?
The opposite, actually—I'm trying to learn some Latin. I have a vague dream of reading the classics in their original language. Whether I stick to it, we'll see.
Oh, I forgot, dammit. You already mentioned this. Hey, just wait for John to finish with his Italian, and then downgrade it down to to Latin. Actually, it's the other way around, isn't it? Latin was downgraded over and over, into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, French, etc.
And English! I find it pretty interesting that we got some of our 'downgraded Latin' from Latin itself, but also indirectly from French, which was basically already-downgraded Latin.
I wonder if it was an improvement. Latin is exhausting! The grammar of Latin and all the other Romance languages is much more straightforward.
This was a wonderful post.
Thank you, Sam! :)
If? WTF? Let's try is.
The question if, of course, rhetorical. Is it not?
There are certainly people who'd reflexively dismiss this as chauvinism. I'm not one of them. And I hate, hate, hate studying foreign languages, and I always did.
That having been said: the very fact that I can't read any other language at all well means that I can't really judge if we have the best language. I cannot tell if reading Anna Karenina in the original Russian is better than reading Constance Garnett's translation, because I can only do the latter.
As for beauty: I've often thought that an experiment could be done with newborns, similar to the ones where they measure the intrinsic attractiveness of faces by how long the babies look at them. You could play recordings of people speaking a language which the baby has never heard, from a different part of the world, and record their reactions, i.e. for an African baby you'd be sure to play Asian languages; for an Asian baby, European languages, etc.
This would give you some idea which languages are pleasing in a culturally-independent way. Probably the results would be career-ending for whatever professors published them, since no one wants to hear that they have the ugliest language in the world.