You are right Matt, I am very interested in language, it’s origin, how it shapes our thinking, how it is embedded in our culture. How certain things just cannot be expressed the same way in another language. French swearing I just excellent, these folk are just amazingly resourceful when it comes to imaginative ways to verbally kick the other person’s butt. Things like ‘you look like a stocking filled with poop’ sound so much better in French and are actually abit silly in English, hey Sebastian Brassard please help me out here ! ;)
I use language every day. The way I have to communicate with my patients, by talking to psychiatrically ill patients you really get an insight how language and thinking works and what power one simple word can have.

-= Mark Vergeer - Armchair Arcade editor =-

Study LanguagesLearning a language later in life has it's disadvantages. People tend to loose whatever language they've acquired just as fast when they don't practice speaking, reading and listening it. That doesn’t happen to one native’s tongue though. Immigrants tend to get worse at speaking their native tongue when they pick up the new language more and more but totally revert to their mother tongue in later life and can even loose command of the language of their new homeland. Lots of countries have special homes for the elderly that cater to specific nationalities.

Here in Europe it’s hard to avoid being exposed to different languages, one doesn’t really have to work at keeping it up that much. Travel by car for three hours and one could easily be in an entirely different language zone. Having lived in the US for a short while I’ve been granted a more ‘inside view’ of the situation in the States than most Europeans will have and I think Americans only seldom get exposed to different languages in day to day life. Most people are just exposed to English and Spanish. In large cities it’s a bit different with larger conglomerates of ethnic groups. In New York it is virtually impossible to hearing Italian or Jiddish (which I can actually pretty much understand because it is very close to a form of German). I am a language freak, have a nack for accents, dare to practice and can even fool people into thinking I can actually speak the language because I re-use a lot of the stuff and sounds that I hear around me.

But not all people in Europe are fluent in multiple languages though. The rule is sort of like this, the bigger the country the fewer people speak foreign languages. The media also has a lot to do with it, in Germany for example foreign movies are always dubbed in German. They even have specific voice actors for specific on-screen actors, I know that people often don’t even know what actors sound like for real and still if they do know they still prefer the German voice. So by watching movies, the German kids miss out on being exposed to English. In the Netherlands everything is subtitled, the same goes for a lot of Scandinavian countries. Newsstands carry foreign magazines. The French are a dubbing nation too and laws exist that state that French media also has to have at least a minimum of French language movies, music and written word in order to preserve the French culture. I couldn’t find a single English language magazine in the newsstands I saw in the Paris Train station, Vichy France during my holidays btw.

And using another language is more than just translate sentences. I've just read a wonderful little book written by Maarten H. Rijkens 'I always get my sin' that emphasizes the differences between English and Dutch and the way English often is used in a bizarre way by the Dutch. Very much like the Japanese Jenglish or Engrish there exists a strange form of Denglish. Often it is because of proverbs just being used and ‘translated’ literally. Many proverbs in language are similar or even the same but a lot of them just are not. In English with bad weather it’s raining cats and dogs, in French cords are falling and in Dutch it’s pipe-sticks’.
Examples of this bizarre English the Dutch sometimes use and what they actually mean to say:
‘I thank you from the bottom of my heart and also from my wife’s bottom’ = My wife and I thank you from the bottom of our hearths
‘I do not want to fall with the door in house’ = I don’t want to barge in, I don’t want all the attention at once
‘I always get my sin’ = I always get what I want.
‘How do you do and how do your do your wife’ = How are you and how is your wife?
‘Thank you for your recent writings’ = thank you for your reply
‘what do you?’ = What do you do for a living?

A Dutch politician once say in a foreign meeting:
‘I am the first woman state secretary for the inside…’ = I am the first woman state-secretary of internal affairs
‘…and I am having my first period’ = and it’s my first time in office
‘…I am late because I couldn’t find the head entrance’ = I am late because I couldn’t find the main entrance
‘During the earthquake the building was shaking on it’s fundamentals’

Dr Holst Trenité (1870-1946) has written a poem about how difficult learning English is for the Dutch, he suggests giving up altogether. ‘The Chaos’ or a Dutchman’s difficulties with the English language
Dearest creature in creation,
Sudying English pronounciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse,
It will keep you Susy, busy
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye your dress you’ll tear,
So shall I! Oh, hear my prayer,
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, beard and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain….
The poem goes on and on – difficult English spelling and pronunciation being displayed constantly.

I am a freak and I could go on about this subject forever. So I’d better quit. Imagine how difficult it is for us to learn and speak Japanese and vice versa! ;) Still I consider picking up Kanji or learning Japanese.

And the US is very very big. I remember it's hard to even imagine life beyond the borders sometimes. ;) Gosh I am a freak. I could write paragraphs about this. Imitating accents whilst doing it :)

-= Mark Vergeer - Armchair Arcade editor =-