#thoughts about language

[glittereyelids]

My host family has been using えらい to describe me the entire semester and I never knew what it meant but it sounds kind of like つらい so I subconsciously connected it to that and was like ?? negative connotation ?? But I finally looked it up and it's literally the opposite of つらい lmao they've been complimenting me this whole time and I've been too stupid to realize

[yocuento]

A language I want to learn

I want to learn a language

The one that feels like coming home

What language do I speak now

It doesn’t feel like home

It feels like water in my lungs

It feels like glass on my tongue that shatters every time I speak

With a sound everyone can hear

With a pain everyone can feel

It feels like drowning

Am I still valuable with my single glass tongue?

Am I still valuable with no connection?

Isn’t that what you wanted?

Isn’t that enough?

Maybe if I learned the language of the tutumairekurai and manatee

I’ll learn a vocabulary large enough to hold our sadness

I’ll learn the language of home and how to carry the weight of what we’ve lost

Even with water in my lungs

I’d learn to speak and pour out all I have to offer

Even if all I have to give is my body to the earth

‘Let me mean something’

I will scream until my tongue has been smoothed by turbid waters

I will scream until I am surrounded by an ocean

Now with emptied lungs and a sea glass tongue

I’ll stand in the body I’ve created

Am I valuable now?

—SH 12.3.21

[artimace]

This morning, I’m thinking about the weird linguistic connection between weather and being in various languages. Like, in French, if you ask about the weather (quel temps fait-il?) the word temps is the same as the word for time. And in Norwegian, the word for weather (vær) is so very close to the to be verb (være). And then the fact that weather is a homophone of whether? Is it a subconscious connection in human language? Does this happen in non-Indo European languages?

[glittereyelids]

I can’t wait to grow old and watch Language evolve

[glittereyelids]

Language is symbols that you learn fit together but it’s just !! consistent!! scribbles!!!!

[jcamilov06]

So the context of why I asked you some of you that question, is that earlier I was translating some dialogs from Argentinean spanish to english, and realized how often in spanish we use verbs and adverbs in different conjugations that makes kinda sense within other natives, but whilst translating the sentence or expression, you end up changing the core of the message(mainly grammar differences), so that it makes sense in another language, so I was wondering if that the case with other-languages-english translations and viceversa 😅

[glittereyelids]

I’ve been in japan long enough (2 weeks) to start questioning all of my English idioms I use with other native English speakers

[glittereyelids]

Short stories show up between wake and sleep and poems bubble up from your gut to your fingers