I'm naked and I'm far from home... @you-dont-know-my-mind - Tumblr Blog

The idea of english as a mother tongue is so strange to me, in my head english is how ppl communicate when there's no way in common to communicate, so english as a mother tongue sounds a bit like idk email as a mother tongue ykwim? Like english to me feels like the stuff that's used to fill the empty spaces between languages

carnivorine

Ok English is my native language and unfortunatly the only one I know yet, but this reminds me so much of that passage in Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

chthonic-cassandra

Interviewer: What difference in usage would you point out in these three languages [Russian, English, French], these three instruments?

Nabokov: Naunces. If you take framboise in French, for example, it’s a scarlet color, a very red color. In English, the word raspberry is rather dull, with perhaps a little brown or violet. A rather cold color. In Russian it’s a burst of light, malinovoe; the word has associations of brilliance, of gaiety, of ringing bells. How can you translate that?

- Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor. Bryan Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, Eds.