for the love of language

     I had an English teacher in high school who grew up in South Africa. Because of the stark differences in culture that surrounded her in childhood, she became obsessed with other cultures and their languages. One of my first high school classes was her World Literature course. She reminded us constantly of the limits of the English language compared to other languages around the world, even those one might immediately assume to be inferior. She told us about an African people who have a word just for the blue-green color of the ocean. Though if one were to compile a dictionary of their language it would hardly be a novel. I had never before questioned the fact that I hadn’t been given any words to describe the color of the sea. How does one describe that it in English? Blue-green doesn’t do it justice, the Wikipedia entry for blue-green redirects to cyan, but that is hardly the color of the South African sea, so deep and varied. Cyan is flat and bright. The article also references the European bee-eater bird and Uranus as cyan-colored. No, no.

     So then you have to start adding on more adjectives, deep maybe? But deep blue-green sounds forced and still doesn’t give a clear picture. How disappointing. It’s silly! That’s one of the first lessons you learn in good writing: never use two words where one would suffice. While the English language is extensive, it is not even nearly exhaustive. But even as extensive as it is, it’s full of dead words, words which no one would ever even know how to use anymore, and many of the words we have that we do use are over-purposed. One which has always bothered me is “to know.” You know your friends, how to swim, answers to test questions and your way around your hometown. The middle two options are pretty straight forward, they’re fact-based, easily determined. But the first and the last are emotional, they are felt. Granted there is also the biblical sense of the verb: to know someone sexually, which I find to be quite beautiful. It makes sex something much deeper than intercourse, like you were fucking their soul or something. But in general the English language doesn’t do the nuanced beauty in the difference between fact-based knowing and feeling-based knowledge the justice that other languages do. For something so broad and important as knowing it’s disappointing that the English language falls flat.

     In the first year of studying French you learn that “to know” is savoir, you learn how to say “I know how to play guitar” (je sais jouer de la guitar) during your roleplay exercises, or simply “je sais” when you raise your hand to answer a question. Easy enough. In your second year however you’re introduced to connaitre. She is the feeling behind knowing, she knows the route to the place in your heart where you love your friends and she knows the soft spot you have for your hometown - even though you always swore you couldn’t wait to turn 18 so you could get the hell out and never look back. And I think that if I were very passionate about playing the guitar I wouldn’t say “je sais jouer de la guitar” I would said “je connais la guitar” and no one would find very much wrong with it at all, in fact they might then understand that I don’t just play the guitar, I play it with all of my heart. It is true that connaitre is also over-purposed. Depending upon the tense and the context and whether or not it is transitive or intransitive it can also meet “to meet.” But there is so much more feeling in it.

     I’d like to start an American English Council for Language, like L’Academie francaise , which presides over the French language. They work to preserve the beauty and meaning of every word in a world so connected that languages are becoming tainted, intertwined. Someone from L’Academie probably had a heart attack when the French decided that the word for “weekend” would be “le weekend.” A different council is currently deliberating on what to call “cloud computing.”

     A universal language? No, thank you.

     I want every word I speak, think and write to be as full of meaning as I am capable of feeling. I want every word to be worth more than the effort it took to conceive and convey it. Language as a whole – every different language and dialect down to each word and syllable – is precious. There’s a reason why language evolved as it did all over the world. A reason for the vast differences in language. There is such beauty in those differences.

     I wish we would stop taking that for granted.