The Genius of Language

"This is a series of essays by writers, mostly novelists. It’s about the way they approach different languages. All the authors are non-English native speakers who have come to write in English and now predominantly write only in English. It’s different writers telling stories of the interface between the two languages in their own minds, and in their own cultures. So in each case there is a cultural story too, and then you hear about the qualities of the language. For example, you have Amy Tan, who wrote The Joy Luck Club , writing about Chinese and English. She grew up with both in the home. She will sceptically knock down a lot of the claims that people make about Chinese: how Chinese people must think differently because the Chinese language has this or that property. But then another writer, Bharati Mukherjee, takes the approach that her language, Bengali, is completely different from English and forces the mind to think in different ways about very basic concepts, like love and fear. So you get different people’s attitudes about this in their own mind. They are obviously good wordsmiths themselves, who think a lot about language. In a way, these attitudes are what the other four books I described are about. These are not PhDs who sat down and did research on the subject, but real language people who write about it from an emotional, impressionistic point of view. Yes, I’m definitely more from the Steven Pinker school of thought. Bharati Mukherjee claims that some of these Bengali words have a resonance that is impossible to carry over into English. But that’s not really true. She’s a good writer in English so she should know that you can do the job with slightly different tools in any language. All languages are fundamentally vastly expressive, that’s one of the tenets every linguist believes. No linguist believes that this language is superior and expressive, or this one is clear, and that one is muddy, this one is logical, that one is emotional etc. That’s the kind of thing that the lay person believes, but most linguists do not and I tend to disagree with that view as well. Is it like the Danish hygge ? A warm feeling of companionship? Yes, it sounds exactly like what the word hygge in Danish, which is totally translatable. When people say x can’t be translated, what they usually mean is that you need a couple of words instead of one word. That can be interesting, but it doesn’t quite mean that the word can’t be translated."