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Wow! Or, Mark goes off on a Loooong journey
Wow, what a thought provoking topic. Thank you to Dawn, Cameron, and Puti for your thoughts on this huge subject. It has had me ruminating and thinking all evening. I can’t put everything in a 3000 word message, so, just in case anyone’s interested, I’m going to start a serial here, and post a section every evening for as long as it takes (so far, something like I week, I’m guessing, unless someone tells me to shut up). I hope people will correct me, question me, reply, or whatever. I hope I come up with something that gets other people thinking too. This topic has really grabbed me.
I have always been and will always be a fervent advocate of multilingualism (not bi-lingual, multi-lingual.) I have taken two years each of formal Spanish and Mandarin courses. I’ve also taken shorter “crash courses” through the military in German and Turkish. On top of that, I’ve dabbled in at least six other languages. I remember being in Israel the year I graduated from High School, on a study program including students from thirteen countries all over the world. Students from non-English-Speaking countries spoke a minimum of five languages, and a friend of mine from Mexico spoke eight languages fluently. I never had a more vivid awareness of what I was missing by having grown up in a linguistically isolated country like the U.S.
Of course, there are all of the great advantages of broadening your horizons, of extending the range of your flexibility to move in different social environments. But something that becomes more and more clear to me now, with four languages under my belt, is something Puti alludes to in his comments:
In the post modern world, we are becoming more and more aware of how much language shapes the way we see the world, how we think, how we analyze, how we solve problems. The more I learn, the more I see how this can be so. I’ll show you some examples in my next installment.
Mark Springer
Sacramento, CA, USA
Normal member
Speaking: English, Spanish
Studying: Spanish, Portuguese
Studied: German, Turkish, Mandarin Chinese
Played with: Russian, Hebrew, Latin, Tagalog, French, Sign language
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Language pair: English; All
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