Comments made on CLS
GENERALLY: This video made me really remember a lot of anecdotes I have read along the years. I love the study of language and language development and differences around the world. I enjoyed the way Lera brought us through many different aspects of language, including orientation, verbs, colours, numbers. She really explains things well and is quite funny.
CHRONOLOGICALLY:
I remember reading about a people in the islands of Indonesia who always speak about direction in terms of a central mountain. However when they are away from their island the directions become difficult to discuss since they can no longer see the mountain. I think there is something to be said for directionality to come from the human body for traveling people.
Growing up in a certain place I have a good sense of direction, in Vancouver if you want to point North it is towards the mountains, but away from Vancouver I have no idea what direction is North South East West. It is interesting that humans have not evolved a more innate sense of direction and that we rely to heavily on visual clues to get our bearings.
There is a really good example of this in movie title translations. I think it was the movie The Colour Purple that was translated into an African language that did not have a word for purple. There are many instances of translations going wrong but the idea that certain people cannot see the distinction between colours because their language does not have a word for them has fascinated me for a long time. I appreciate the way to explains it in terms of Russian, which she is a native speaker of.
I speak French as my native language and I teach it in school. I find myself constantly correcting students on the gender of words. The harsh sound of someone saying “le” when it should be “la” is jarring as a native speaker but when you think about it it is meaningless. The chair does not have to be feminine and the tale masculine, they are arbitrary choices.
I’ve heard that joke before as a man who always buys two baguettes because he could never remember the feminine masculine. I think the joke speaks to the arbitrary nature of gender specific nouns and peoples desire not to feel humiliated when speaking a second language.
The difficulty with translations is such a fascinating topic. I’ve read about a certain book, I think it’s “Around the world in 80 days” by Jules Verne, that was translated from he original French into English then into Chinese and from there into Japanese and the words are so far removed from the original meaning that it is almost a new book.
I spend much of my days regularly translating things from English to French to use in my classroom and I am sure that I do a mediocre job of it.
