Prompt: Words. Chamberlin talks a lot about language, in particular the strangeness and wonder of how language works. Stories, he says, “bring us close to the world we live in by taking us into the world of words” (italics mine,1). He describes learning to read and write as learning “to be comfortable with a cat that is both there and not there” (132). Based on Chamberlin’s understanding of how riddles and charms work, explain this “world of words.” Reflect on why “words make us feel closer to the world we live in” (1).
—Dr. Erika Paterson, ENGL 470 Lesson 1:2
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I’d like to begin by reflecting on how I learned to read words, which is a very difficult memory to conjure because I learned how to read at a very early age. I cannot remember a world where a physical thing could not be represented by a black-and-white graphic, and now I wonder how I would be perceiving the world if I’d never learned that…
I learned how to read in Chinese first and I think Chinese was easier for a child to grasp in terms of understanding the concept of reading. Chinese doesn’t use an alphabet or phonetic sounds; rather, characters are unique symbols that stand for a unique thing. Chinese characters are also derived from pictographs; for example, the character for “fire” actually looks like fire. This reminds me of my classmate’s Alyssa Ready’s first post about the importance of recognizing non-western symbols in literature: for western readers, a symbol is metaphorical and conceptual, but for non-western readers, symbols can be practical and conceptual at once. Indeed, “metaphor is the basic trick of language” and “[l]inguists used to say that every word was once a metaphor” (Chamberlin 163).
I learned how to read in English thanks to both the diligent tutelage of my mother’s flashcards and my own interest in reading. As a shy and imaginative only child, I loved reading because it could be done alone. Reading was a way to entertain myself and escape from everyday humdrum. After I learned how to “sound things out”, reading in English came easily to me. If I didn’t know a word, all I had to do was consult a dictionary.
Reading gave me agency. Gave me an individuality, an independence. Notice how many of these kids talk about how reading will help with their future career. Another example is a widely-circulated YouTube video on the power of words—changing how you say the same message can endow it more power.
Being able to read words gave me power: power to relate to those who didn’t live in my non-English-speaking household and power to explore worlds on my own with minimal adult help. Especially for children, who don’t have much power, this was a big deal.
Words connected me to both my non-English-speaking private life and my English-speaking public one. I have clear memories of things “lost in translation” too—there were certain concepts I learned in Chinese that I struggled with translating to English, and vice versa. Which created a sort of miniature culture-clash on the playground. There were things I could never really describe “properly.” To give you a sense of what I mean, here is a fun Lifehack list of words (and concepts!) not available in the English language.
I loved Chamberlin’s chapter on riddles the most, as I think it relates well with my experience of growing up with two languages. I learned early on that a character was “pure metaphor, the basis of all belief” (Chamberlin 160). And when I was introduced to the phonetic system and a language that described the world in a way completely different from the world in Chinese, I had to change my understanding of the world the way Chamberlin claims Homer did (161).
The magic of words lie in their ability to give power. Take away words, and you take away more than a child’s adventure. You can take away entire civilizations’ ability to tell their stories and express what they mean, what they really mean, and take away your own potential power to understand them.
*This goes longer than the post’s prescribed word count, but if you have extra time and more interest, may I direct you to my reply to Gretta’s comment (the first comment on this post), in which I describe in further detail the uniqueness of written Chinese in the presence of dialects. There is an analogous relationship here to oral vs. written subculture, as most Chinese dialects that are not Mandarin cannot be written, but are often fiercely—almost patriotically—protected against extinction by its speakers.
Works cited and consulted
Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004. Print.
Gardner, Andrea. “The Power of Words.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 23 Feb. 2013. Web. 20 May 2015. (Citation format suggested by Purdue OWL because MLA guide doesn’t have one).
The Purdue OWL. Purdue U Writing Lab, 2010. Web. 20 May 2015.
Hello Charmaine!
What a great post! The Chinese language (I’m guessing Mandarin?) sounds extremely poetic and beautiful. I love the idea of the visual form of the letters as a part of the literature and the art–somewhat like calligraphy. This reminds me of highly structural poems in English where the typography and form is manipulated.
I was wondering, do you think the visual nature of the Chinese language in any way effects oral story-telling? Other than the (really cool!) list of words that cannot be properly expressed in English, do you find that certain concepts or feelings are better described in one language over the other? Does the visual nature of Chinese characters better enable you to describe the physical?
Thanks for the great post!
Gretta
Hi Gretta, glad you enjoyed the post! I had a fun time writing it.
It may be interesting to point out that I speak little Mandarin; rather, I was raised in a Cantonese household. The Cantonese dialect (or language, some may claim), is an interesting one in that it has no written form. Rather, one must “translate” Cantonese into a “written form” (sort of like another tense tense) before writing it down. Thus, if you read a paragraph of Chinese in Cantonese aloud, it would not be the form commonly spoken. However, although a Mandarin person could read the same paragraph in Mandarin, since both dialects utilize the same characters, the Mandarin person would be reading a “tense” that is exactly the same as what is spoken in Mandarin, because Mandarin doesn’t have this additional tense. What you speak in Mandarin you write in Mandarin, but what you speak in Cantonese you don’t write in Cantonese.
Confusing, I know, but this intricacy has many neat consequences! For example, there are ways of speech and words used in Cantonese (slang, as you may describe it) that cannot be translated into Mandarin, despite both dialects belonging to the same family of Chinese. Therefore, I would chance to say that Cantonese speakers have their own unique subculture—an ORAL subculture, if you will!—that is often quite humorous and theatrical and often makes fun of the “propriety” of the Mandarin mainstream. (Mandarin is the legally official and socially mainstream way of speech in China, a country that has many, many, MANY dialects). No doubt Mandarin probably has a similar subculture of its own, but I did not grow up in that, unfortunately, and would not be able to appreciate its nuances.
This is really interesting, as an English speaker the concept learning a written language based in Pictographs. As you said “Chinese characters are also derived from pictographs; for example, the character for “fire” actually looks like fire” and I feel like this would have made a difference for me. I had the opposite early childhood. I had struggled with reading and could not figure out the relation between words and the actual items. I spent a couple years being taught privately before learning to read. I was separated from my classmates and because of this they liked to ridicule me. Our culture puts such an emphasis on the literary tradition that even when a student struggles with language both adults and children define it as “wrong”. Is this the effect of the English European traditions present in Canada? Is it necessarily wrong to attempt a level of literacy among the populous?
Hey James, thanks for your comment. Ah, the weight we put on literacy! I see literacy as something that is, at the end of the day, very convenient to have. Perhaps I am biased, because I spent much of my my early life reading. Books were, and are, a big part of my life and in a highly positive way. But now that I think about it—was it the act of reading words that gave me euphoria or was it what the words stood for? Of course, it’s the latter: I loved reading because of the stories, the characters, the worlds. And those things are not limited to written literature. You can find the same freedom and education, even, in film, TV, drama, music, and of course live storytelling! As a creative writing student who watches a lot of television and has dabbled in screenwriting, I like to think of TV as the new novel—TV used to be ridiculed so much as brain-mushing sludge, but the sophistication of recent series in their ability to tell stories, build character, and explore themes and morals tells otherwise.
Hi Charmaine!
Loved the post. I found what you said about words being significant and meaningful because they give you power to relate to the world around you, to understand others and be understood yourself. It seems like Chamberlain is mainly focusing on reading and writing here, but I would love to draw a small connection to the differences that may lie between literacy and orality. I wrote my blog post this week on the damaging effects of seeing culture and communication as structured with orality being a primitive, unevolved form that is redundant as soon as literacy is discovered. However, for cultures that still rely on storytelling, song, symbols, etc to communicate, written words do not hold this same “power”. Do you think this idea of power can be expanded to include communication in general? The written word but also the spoken word? How do you think the two forms possibly change or influence the power one derives? Just some questions that popped into my head. Feel free to check out my blog post and leave some thoughts 🙂
Hey Freda, I did check out your post and left a comment =) As for your question here I wrote a comment on the matter, kind of, on Alishae’s blog so you can check that out if you want to.
Gist of it is, words have power and I think this power can be both accentuated and diminished by adding more elements, such as visual and sound elements, to it. By putting words into a melody, the words may become more powerful, or, the complexity of the melody may take away attention from the words. I wrote on Alishae’s blog that an example that comes to mind is film adaptations of books. Often people like the book version more than the film version—is it because in the book version we are allowed to imagine, whereas the film version imagines things for us?
So I think it’s a double-edged sword…
🙂 🙂