The weekend involved a few conversations about language in various languages: Catherine and Caroline were visiting, and they are both francophones. Catherine is a French as a Second Language teacher, and her linguistic capabilities are by no means limited to English and French. Add this into an already linguistically challenged household: HP would rather speak German than English, and both he and Lorenz will speak a Swabian version of German that is far less Swabian than mine so it becomes a conscious effort for me to move my German closer to High German for them - and it makes me feel awkward. However, when I'm with my family - and my brother came for breakfast on Sunday - I switch to my version of the dialect. HP's French is very good, my French is pathetic (just good enough for eavesdropping, but that's about it). Catherine's German is better than my French. So the conversations were going on in French, English and various permutations of German, depending on who was involved in the conversation. On Sunday morning, there were seven of us at the table - and none of us could claim English as our first language, yet it was the one we were speaking. How very Canadian of us.
One of the things Catherine and I agreed on was that sometimes, you are simply missing words - you are used to having a certain word in one language, and its absence becomes a hole in the other. For example, I hate the asinine "a tomato is a fruit" conversation (this was prompted by a discussion of the Biodynamic Calendar and fruit vs. leaf vs. root vs. flower days). In German, the tomato is a fruit but it's not a fruity fruit like an apple and orange and that conversation becomes irrelevant: we have a word for the fruity fruit (Obst) which distinguishes it from the biological fruit of a plant (Frucht). Both German and French have a singular third-person pronoun, which avoids the awkward "one" or "they" sentences in English. Then, there are words in German that simply have no English equivalent (e.g. schadenfroh) or the ones where the translation is just not enough to capture the feeling of the other word (e.g. lästern). It makes for a lot of "lost in translation" kind of moments, this dynamic.
I've always maintained that you can tell something about a culture by its vocabulary, and German is as good an example as any. Not only is there a lot of precision in that language (we have different words for eating as it refers to people - essen - and animals - fressen), but we have a whole host of words which refer to our more negative qualities (the above-mentioned schadenfroh, and the multitude of words I have which give a negative slant to the notion of mocking and teasing). However, I'll also maintain that my personality changes to some extent depending on the language I'm speaking - I become more or less direct and assertive, for example.
In my adult life, I have never been nor could I ever be as comfortable in German as I am in English. This is the language I managed (most of) my education in. Beyond this, however, when I speak English I have the comfort of knowing that my accent does not betray a backwoods stigma - I speak as well as any newscaster. I don't have to make any effort to not lapse into a regional dialect. My English is as Canadian as it gets, really.
Posted by Johanna at March 29, 2004 02:34 PM