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.
