Textual Reflexions

Just to show the other face of the medal I give you a futher link on the theme of the nice guys, dedicated to all those auto-proclaimed nice guys that have no real reason to hate or despise women:

Anti-ode to the nice guys

The abuse of language is one of the aspects of human communication that displeases me more.

Most languages have synonyms that have already lost every difference in the sense, beyond phonetic aspects. Obviously most people use the language at the very basic level, so they cannot be blamed for flattening the language. The ones to blame are the compilers of dictionaries that don’t bring enough attention to the differences between words.

On the other hand we have the “abuse of language”. Many words became in the years to mean everything and nothing, and often the meanings have little to do with the real word. It’s the case of the word love for example, the in these days means more mating than loving. As for myself I think I will return to use the Greek words and .

Another interesting phenomenon is the shift of meaning between a chain of words as we have in the French verbs embracer (’to hug’, shifted into ‘to kiss’) and baiser (’to kiss’, shifted into ‘to have a sexual intercourse’). I still don’t know how to say to hug in French without implying the shifted meaning.

I would be quite interested to create a language that minimize such abuses and is wealth enough in meanings to allow poets to write poems. I am not sure though that this is possible, but I’ll try. I don’t mind if the number of speakers will be as little as that of the Zoinx and Blabo languages invented by my colleagues Apo and DH.

I admit I know quite a bunch of languages (I think I could name 5 of them without the fear of exaggerating in my skills in that particular language). However Murphy’s law always finds a way to show me it is not even merely enough.

As a matter of fact I plan or rather hope to go to the Netherlands for work related reasons. And obviously I don’t know Dutch. It is not the first time it happens: three years ago I had to learn French to continue my studies and in order to go live in Italy some 15 years ago I had to know Italian.

This time I am optimistic and I don’t consider it a tragedy. Let me say that I never fell in love with a girl and declared my love twice using the same language. It seams that there are much more human idioms that girls worth meeting. This gives as a upper bound of about 1 girl I could fall in love with in 500,000 females of Homo sapiens sapiens, which takes into account also babies and old ladies that surely don’t match my ideal of partner. Continuing this stupid series of calculations my beloved Paris carries 6 of such creatures in the inner ring. I think it’s useless to say that I never met one and I am not in the mood to look for them.

I don’t think Dutch will cause any problem, the problem is always English. This stupid test which assume you lose the ability to speak the language after two years and only provides profits to the country I hate the most, will always persecute me. I start learning English about 16 years ago and, I don’t know how, I am still able to talk and write it. Let hell curse American.

Update: This post reminds me a joke in Polish about policemen I’ll translate:

A man arrives in Warsaw, gets lost and asks two policemen for directions:

«Do you speak English?»— he asks.
«No»—answer a policemen.
«Parlez-vous français ?»
«No»
«Parlate italiano?»
«No»
«¿Hablas español?»
«No»
«
«No»
«Sprechen Sie Deutsch?»
«No»
«Spreekt u Nederlands?»
«No»
«»
«No»
The man goes away desperate. One policemen says to the other:
«You know, we should learn some foreign language.»
«What for? He knew 8 and it didn’t help him.»

Some of the expressions above were supplied by Wikitravel. Wikitravel, take it with you wherever you travel.