Language
I read this book called Le Ton Beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter.

The book is nothing less than amazing. The way it is crafted lends to much stopping and pondering. It doesn’t seek to define language, but it explores language, all of language, in such a way that without even thinking about it, one comes up with various theories and opinions about how everything works together. It’s not so much specific passages or quotes that made me excited about reading it, it’s the things that the reading made me think of which really made an impression on me.

And, if you know me, you know I love sharing all my random ideas and theories with other people.

My first idea is something kind of obvious - that a language isn’t the sum of its nouns and verbs and written rules, it’s all in the way you speak it. Basically, the rules by which we define a language doesn’t make the language itself. The first thing about this is that the way you use language to communicate doesn’t always follow the rules. In fact, rarely ever follows the rules. And you don’t need to even have an understanding of the rules in order to speak a language. For instance, in Japanese I’m always hearing people say “iijya.” You can’t look up iijya in the dictionary but the meaning of this phrase is “it’s good.” It comes from, “iijyanai” or “iidewanai” which literally means, “it’s not good.” But when posed as a question it becomes more like, “Isn’t it good?” But when you hear someone say “iijya” you don’t think about it being a question, or a negative expression. The person might as well have just said “It’s good!” and is looking for confirmation of this opinion. What I’m getting at is that the rules say that this phrase means “not good” when in actuality, everyone knows that this means “is good.”

A Japanese person was trying to tell me that she was so glad to have read my email because she got a chance to catch up on what I’d been doing lately. She said to me, “I could know your late situations!!” I said to her that she should actually say something like, “It was good to catch up with you.” If you were a foreigner trying to translate that sentence, what would you think? The dictionary would tell you that “to catch” means something like capturing an animal or grabbing a ball from the air. A really good dictionary might tell you that, “to catch up with x” means that x is ahead in something, and that catching up means getting to that level. How would you figure out that in context it all means “getting to know what one has been doing recently.” So fluency in a language isn’t about knowing the rules and vocabulary, actually. It’s about knowing what to say in which situation. It’s about interpreting the interaction of sounds and context. If you can do that, you can say surprisingly little and come up with a lot of meaning. You can say, “Be back” and have it make sense.

Have you ever stopped to listen to yourself talk? I have a lot of tape recordings I did for some research and it’s almost impossible to write down quotes because just about everything said is grammatically incorrect. I’ve been listening to myself talk a lot, recently, in preparation for having to teach English. I’m really bad at talking. I’ve always known this, but actually listening to myself makes me even more aware. I often just throw out a lot of words and rely on the listener to sort it out. What’s awful is that I’ll do the same thing in Japanese. Every flaw you have in your first language is only accented horribly in your second and third...

In Le Ton Beau de Marot, Hofstadter has one chapter that impresses upon you just how varied a single language can be. That’s definitely something I agree with! I lived in Arizona when I was a kid. There really weren’t any trees there, and the few that did exist had this long wispy branches with tiny little leaves. If someone told me to draw a tree, I would immediately attempt to recreate the spindly, wispy branches and not spend too much time trying to render foliage. On the other hand, someone who has lived their whole life in Colorado might draw some kind of evergreen. It all has to do with what your definition of a tree is. Differences in people coincide with differences in definitions. “Tree” to an Arizonan means something different than “Tree” does to a Coloradoan. But probably “Tree” to someone living in Fort Collins is similar to someone living in Denver. Yet even then, each person has their own unique definition. The image of a tree in my head is going to be slightly different than the one in my neighbor’s head. Maybe everyone in the world has a very slightly different definition for “Tree.”

I did an anthropological study on cosplay a while back. It was really fascinating. One of the things that was fun to do was to find words that mean certain things to cosplayers that wouldn’t mean the same thing to someone outside of that circle. For instance, “Anime.” Anime means something entirely different to a cosplayer than it does to my mother. And even among cosplayers, it is going to hold a different definition between Japanese people and Americans. And depending on what genres people enjoy, the definitions are going to vary further. There will be a different definition of “anime” for people who live in Fort Collins and cosplay only from comical science fiction anime and for people who live in Denver and cosplay only from comical romantic anime. And those two groups will also have different definitions for “science fiction” and “romantic” and “cosplay.” It gets almost to the point where you wonder how any of us can communicate if we all speak such different languages.

However the same concept can be taken backwards.

The more specific the group, the closer and closer people’s definitions are. Cosplayers in Colorado and Arizona have more similar definitions for “anime” than elderly Japanese people. One could say that finding relationships is a matter of finding people who’s definitions are more in sync with your own. Maybe the definition you have for “tree” doesn’t really matter, but things like, “respect,” and “fun” will have a lot of weight.

If you find someone who speaks the sam language - the same sub-language - the same sub-sub language as you, you will be able to find more in common. Mingling with friends, I’m realizing how important Japanese is to my every day vocabulary. There are things I understand, like cultural references and patterns of speech, that create how I interact and speak with people. I have so much more in common with people who are also students of Japanese. There is somewhat of a rift between my friends who do not understand any Japanese.

Specialization in any area is the same as becoming more fluent in a very specific language. For example a student could feel comfortable around a variety of people, having a basic education, but then he goes off to become a scientist, and now takes on a very specialized vocabulary. Another friend may become an artist, and now there are two different sets of jargon that set them apart. Someone could become a doctor, and the words he will tend to insert into conversation will make him appear intelligent, where another person takes to the streets, learns slang, and starts to appear less than intelligent based on what words they use. Society often decides what makes a person smart or stupid based on what they chose to fill their minds with. One of my roommates can play video games in two languages, has a great sense of strategy and a tendency to view things in a very mathematical, objective manner. She can go through a video game as fast as lightning. None of these skills are useful in the “real world.” No one admires her. It’s nothing she can put on an application. It’s not a skill deemed important to society. But it is still a skill, is it not?

Another way to think about definitions is that one word can have 4 billion different meanings, one for every person in the world and perhaps more. That’s kind of daunting to anyone who wants to ever try translating. Not only that, but there are so many hundreds of different languages. For instance, does “Tree” mean the same thing to an English speaker than to someone who speaks English as a second language? One thing that Hofstadter goes into in his book is how every word has its own implications. For example, “french bread” and “baguette” have the same dictionary definition, but imply entirely different things. Because of this, foreign words get imported into any language. Sometimes the translation just doesn’t conjure up the same image as the word in its original language.

So not only does every word have so many definitions, but each language has its own definitions for its own words and those definitions are interpreted differently by each person in their own language.

In studying a second language, I’ve come to realize that when I think of something, like a tree or bread, I don’t think of the word as being directly translatable to the English equivalent. It’s easy to think that when the subtitles say, “Could you help me?” that the person on the TV is saying the direct equivalent of that English phrase in whatever language. But when you’re speaking multiple languages, that isn’t something that ever comes to mind. “Tetsudattekure” and “Could you help me” have the same meaning, perhaps, but one is clearly talking about “help” and the other about “tetsudau.” I used to say sentences that I knew in a very mathematical sense that it would elicit the same reaction as the English equivalent would, but the more I dive into Japanese, the more the whole idea of imposing English definitions on Japanese words becomes alien to me. It’s like instead of having two words for one concept, it’s having two concepts.

That isn’t to say there is anything wrong with translations.

If anything, reading Le Ton Beau de Marot has given me more respect for translating and translators than anything else. It’s given me a lot of courage to try my own hand at translating. Hofstadter realizes from the start that there really is no way to directly translate something. Even preserving the exact feeling and connotations is difficult. A translator isn’t just rendering one set of words into another language. You don’t just substitute A for B like some kind of machine. Instead, it’s a difficult process of finding some kind of pleasant common ground. It’s a negotiation between two different modes of thinking.

People who have never learned a second language often don’t have any idea just how different languages can be. They don’t realize how a language is the product of a whole different style of living and culture. On one end of the world, someone decided that the sound, “no” had a negative feeling about it, and on the other end of the world, someone decided that, “nai” had a negative sense to it. Even just those basic sounds are so different.

History also adds to a language. For instance, the word “book” in English has spawned from the concept of roman letters being lined up in a printing press designed by Gutenberg. Before then, books were written and copied by monks or scribes, and the most important of all books was the Bible. The word “book” itself comes from the word boka, which has Gothic/German roots, and means “beech,” as in the tree who’s wood was used for writing on. In Japanese, the word, “hon” uses a kanji that also means “root,” either of a tree, or an origin of something. The concept comes from the printing press invented by the Chinese where kanji characters were lined up. Before then, “hon” were hand written diaries, collections of poetry, or sutras copied by Buddhist monks. They are bound backwards from Western books. It is this sort of depth to a language that many people just don’t understand.

Something that seems to shock people about Chinese or Japanese is that there are thousands of characters to memorize that each have one meaning. In English, our letters spell out every word. You can read very clearly how each word is supposed to be pronounced. (Of course, English is pretty bad at being consistent about these things, but other languages have a fairly uniform way of pronunciation.) In Chinese, the characters do give some clue as to how they are pronounced, but one does have to know about 5000 individual characters in order to be fluent in the language. In Japanese, characters give very little clues as to how they are pronounced, but one only has to know 2100 characters to read most documents. In English, in order to read, one needs to know a mere 26 letters.

But actually, the difference between reading Chinese and English isn’t really all that different. If it were really so difficult to recognize thousands of words, the Chinese wouldn’t have invented their language like that. Once a person becomes comfortable using a language, words cease to be broken up into their components. Letters become no longer meaningful. Do you ever wonder why it’s more difficult to read THINGS THAT ARE IN ALL CAPS? It’s because we memorize the shape of a word instead of the individual spelling of each word. Just like kanji characters, English words can be recognized by their shape alone. Because of this, we can read blurry text, far away text, or text that is missing letters just by recognizing the shape of the word. We don’t need to necessarily read every letter, and so we can go through text very fast, or skim blocks of text for a single word that’s identified by its shape. A test to prove this is to take a sentence and remove certain letters, but still retain the shape of each word. For example, this sxntxncx is stxll somxwhxt readxble. If you replace letters with ‘x’s, the sentence is still somewhat readable, but if you simply eliminate letters, the words lose their shape and become difficult to understand.

In fact, it may be even easier to read words that are each uniquely different than having fewer characters to memorize. The more variations text has, the easier it is the decipher one word from another. When reading something quickly, one might not catch the difference between Tuesday and Thursday because their shape is so similar, but one will definitely distinguish Friday from Wednesday. To separate out words further, English has a different way of writing numbers than simply spelling them out. We also have symbols for & and $ and #. In Japanese, they have a whole different system for spelling foreign words. A Japanese postal address could potentially include a combination of five different sets of characters, from numbers through kana. All of this helps the brain to differentiate between words. The more differentiation, the easier it is to read.

Sound differentiation is important, too. The more varied the sounds are in a language, the easier to differentiate words and thus meaning. Japanese only has about 16 different sounds while English has around 40. The fewest number of sounds in a language is 11 and the highest is 141. Also, the length of words have significance, too. There are three words that sound like “too” in English, but there is only one way to say, “Word.” “Word,” however, can have a few different meanings. It can stand for “Microsoft Word” or be used as a slang term, or it could mean one of the components of a sentence. Japanese is rather terrible when it comes to similar words. Every other kanji seems to have, “shu” or “shuu” or “chu” listed as a pronunciation. When you have a lot of small words like that which each mean something different, there is more information being conveyed in a shorter amount of space. In English you can ask, “Do you want to eat?” in five syllables, five words. In Japanese you can ask, “tabetai?” in three syllables using one word. I would say that that means the speed of the Japanese languages is much higher than English. Spanish, on the other hand, seems to flow almost exactly at the rate of English.

Most of this isn’t about the book I read so much as it is me rambling on about language.

So more about the book... I really love it. I love how Hofstadter doesn’t outright tell you about anything he thinks. Instead he gives you examples and points of view and allows you to develop your own theories. I also love how the book develops. I’ll find some quote in the book like, “Mom in yon” that won’t make any sense out of context and one would have to read the previous 300 pages in order to get a sense of why that phrase is so amazing. The entire book is this way. Even in the first ten pages, he sets you up on one topic for some amazing feat of translation that happens in the next chapter. Hofstadter really is amazing.

Well, I think those are all my thoughts.

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