It’s a strange little community I’ve been mingling with the last couple of weeks. I’m talking about the community of language students that have come from all over the world to study Italian here in Siena.
I’ve been hanging mostly with Swiss people and our conversations flow with a mixture of German, English and Italian! I’m so glad I did German at school! I think that learning Italian has helped to cement something in the language-learning part of my brain because I’m able to keep up with the German conversations too (even though it has been ten years since I last studied it). Of course, this is good for practical reasons (i.e. being able to participate in the conversation) but it is also necessary for a more important purpose.
Language is such a vital and profound feature of the human experience. I have always been in awe of linguistics and the use of words, sounds, and tones to convey even the most deep and intangible concepts. It’s truly beautiful.
Here in this little community, I have perceived another side to the faculty of speech. My Swiss friend, Sandy, speaks Swiss-German and German fluently, but can also have a decent conversation in English, Italian and a little French. One day she expressed the feeling that she could not be completely herself unless she was speaking Swiss-German or German.
I think I get the essence of who she is pretty well, but the more I reflected on it, the more I realised that when you can’t fully express everything you think and feel, you can’t convey the entirety of who you are. Our opinions, thoughts, desires, and humour are all suffocated by the absence of words with which to express them. People who are unable to communicate with those around them – for whatever reason – must feel so unbelievably isolated.
A confirmation of this concept came while I was walking and talking with one of my Italian teachers, Claudio. He was telling me (in Italian) all these profound and meaningful things about his perspectives on life and travel and mortality. I understood everything he was saying, but I could not properly express all the responses that filled my mind. I felt that I couldn’t share the part of myself that had been activated by this discourse; I could not be fully myself. It was like having a giant sock stuffed in my mouth, only it wasn’t a sock – it was my lack of Italian vocabulary.
There’s no real point to this particular entry. I just wanted to put it out there because I’ve been thinking a lot about this during the past week. For me there is nothing like the feeling when you are able to find exactly the right words to express some nebulous feeling in your gut or thought in your mind. It’s so liberating. That’s what I love about words. They take the sock out of your mouth and replace it with a beautiful stream of expression that gushes out of you and flows into someone else.
I know exactly what you mean.
ReplyDeleteYou are the rumination queen. Since I became sick I feel like every missing sock in history has ended up in my mouth and is slowly filling the cavity where my brain once resided. I wonder if I went to Italy would my 5yrs of Italian at high school come flooding back, or would it go the way of my English skills. I hope for the former. I want one day, to order my bucket load of gelato in Italian. Though I do wonder if there is an Italian equivalent of "thingy" because that may come in handy:)
ReplyDeletehaha I'm yet to come across an Italian translation for 'thingy' but I agree, it would be handy!!
ReplyDeleteAs for gelato, simply say... "Vorrei un secchio di gelato per favore!"
It is really frustrating when you know what you'd like to say but you finish up having to completely dumb down your response, sometimes even to nothing more than a "Ah, ok" type of response. I found this with Gabriele at Verona. He'd be telling me all sorts of things about the history of what we were looking at and my lack of Italian meant I couldn't really formulate decent responses.
ReplyDeleteBefore I read this blog post, I was actually sat pondering a similar thought yesterday evening as I was people watching over dinner. A French family were sitting at the table next to me and could not speak English. The waiter could not speak French. They still managed to order their meals and even question how they'd be able to eat their pizzas with the blunt knife they had (it was just the knife for spreading butter on the rolls, proper knives were coming with the pizzas). I was sat there thinking, how do you even contemplate travelling to a country where you cannot speak a common language in order to communicate. But in the end, communication isn't really just about words, we're all able to fall right down to facial expressions, hand gestures, grunting at each other and pointing etc. Language just speeds the process up. Some people use it more than others. The frustration probably arises from the complexity with which you choose to use your first language.
Drifting off-topic here, on the subject of human-interaction, I got onto thinking about the way human beings socialise and comparing ourselves to just about every other species in the animal kingdom (we are just animals after all). I don't just mean socialising as in talking to each other over dinner, I mean our inherent desire to entertain each other. I was watching a jazz band play live in the street and it occurred to me that we invented music for pleasure and we all just take it for granted. Some people like playing it. Everybody likes listening to it. Some people like playing it purely so others can listen to it. I don't think any other animal interacts on such a deep and complex level... maybe I'm wrong but I can't say I've ever seen a herd of sheep or a family of monkeys gather spectators and put on a show purely for the purpose of entertainment.
Ok, I got way off tangent, bleh!
Well... Actually I don't think humans are just another kind of animal :)
ReplyDelete"Way off tangent"... get your friends to copy and past it to the relevant twitter page ;p