Talking in (another) tongue
I'm of the opinion that more people should know at least one other language. I'm not talking about some kind of cheesy tourist phrase-book or a I'm-trying-to-pick-up-girls-at-a-summer-course kind of thing.
I'm talking about honest-to-god bilingualism. I'm talking about being in a place where you have to use the language just to survive. I'm talking getting the power cut-off if you can't explain to the guy on the phone that your papers are in actual order. I'm talking about being able to order the food that you actually wanted. It's hard, it's difficult, and it'll turn your world upside down.
Being able to talk in another language means that you'll end up thinking differently. It's a strange thing to slip in and out of one language. Strange associations jump out at you from different angles, as you begin to understand different idioms. Each language has its favorite phrases and pronouns. By choosing that slightly different alternative to say the same thing - you start seeing the world in slightly different ways, with profound effects on what you easily see, or don't see. Speaking in another language, textures your world much more than a character mod in a DOOM extension pack.
There's also nothing quite like the loneliness and frustration in being stuck in a land where no one can communicate with you. People who are generally smart will feel the pain of being slow and retarded. Your tongue will feel thick and unwieldy. Whereas once you were always quick with a witty rejoinder, you are suddenly reduced to monosyllabic responses. Yet there are subtle joys. As you feel your language skills click up a gear, you will feel the pleasure of rediscovering latent social skills.
But more importantly, once you realize that, what was once your monolithic world, is but one of many worlds bound by your native vocabulary, you will realize that it is just that - only one world in a vast universe of possible worlds.
4 comments:
This post perfectly sums up what I'm trying to explain to my French family and friends -- who never left France.
After a few months in anglophone countries, it's still hard to get some water in a restaurant at the first try. (This word is awfully hard to pronounce ;-)
I sometimes just feel just like a four-years old kid... Your conversation can be *so* boring, you are the one who ends up a funny conversation, or, even worse, unwittingly hurts somebody. Then, you just avoid speaking...
I agree wholeheartedly with that opinion even though I'm quite far from bilingual.
I've been trying to learn Japanese for some time now and there seems to be very little common ground between English and Japanese which means the shift in view you describe can be very large. It's hard to say whether the cultures are different and the language is an expression of that or whether the interplay is both ways.
I've been in something like those survival situations you describe when I travelled in country Japan and not being able to read, speak or understand even half of what is around you is very disconcerting. It certainly made me a lot more sympathetic to the non-Anglophones I meet in Australia.
That said, I consider myself a multi-lingual programmer and your point about seeing the world differently definitely applies to the lenses of programming languages. I've noticed how much the common idioms of, say, a functional language like Haskell affects the way I might approach an algorithm or design I'm creating in Java.
Mark,
If true mastery of a language comes with humour and poetry, what is the progamming language equivalent thereof?
I think the metaphor can stretch enough to talk about poetry in programming but it probably breaks when trying to make it cover humour as well.
That said, there are examples of what I would consider humorous code - "double myChance", "while(bored) { ... }", etc - but the humour is rarely very good and relies too heavily on the surprise of seeing human language constructs in code.
The other form of "code humour" I can think of is of the absurdist variety. Entries to the International Obfuscated C Code Contest are bizarre snippets of code that are all but unreadable yet do some bizarre and surprising computation. For example, this chunk of line noise implements a passable game of tetris.
I definitely think there's poetry in code as well, if by poetry we mean a certain elegance, carefulness and efficiency of expression. Unlike human poetry which, I think, tries to express a time, place or human experience, code attempts to express a procedure. This can be done poorly (e.g., spaghetti code) or beautifully (e.g., quicksort in Haskell).
"Poetic" code leaps from the screen into the mind and, even without fully understanding the details, you grasp what is being said.
The one place the analogy falls down though is that "human" poetry can thrive on ambiguity and resonance whereas I don't think there's really a place for that in code.
It reminds me of the quote attributed to Dirac that I stumbled across recently: "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."
Considering the time of year and the fact we're talking about bilingualism, I though you might like this polyglot program. It says "Merry Christmas" in C, Fortran, Pascal and PHP. (Thought it's not as impressive as this 8 language polyglot though).
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