Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Trying to say what you mean

Language has always fascinated me. I think if I had the whole career thing to do over again, (really OVER again) I would be a linguist. To think there are whole other sets of languages that are like my own but with all this different sentence structure and meaning and its own collection of vocabulary. I work in a multi-cultural environment. Everyone but me speaks two and three languages. Needless to say, I feel like a second class citizen because I don't speak something other than English....Fluently.

Language is so dynamic. It evolves just as culture does. It has its own evolutionary existence. I just love it when my multi-cultural cohorts say something in English (their English is exemplary) and yet say English but in their mother tongue, structurally. Or better yet, have a native of England speak to you in English and STILL not get it. Even though the words are the same the meaning and everything else is not.
It is fascinating. There are words in other languages that we don't even have...Because we don't need the word.

So cool!
Do you grok it?

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