And what if the language of my
thoughts is not my native language? What if I am Polish, I feel a strong affection to the history and the heritage of this country but no matter how intensively
I try I would never express myself properly.. I do not even mention problems
with eloquence, no.. May it be the
randomness of vocabulary, its incompatible rhythm or above all inconsequence of language
structure, literally, anything... Every single element of phenomenon called
language can annihilate our internal agreement and cause complete
desintegration! That’s a horrible
vision, isn’t it? Happy are those who
have already discovered that something does not work as they had expected.
Among them we see musicians, painters, sculpturers and .... philologists?
(Gosh, can they really be compaired with the most spiritualized professions
ever?)
Let’s analyse closer their apparently earthbound
situation. There are people who just find pleasure and facility in
discovering foreign languages. One day
this small fascination explodes and they start feeling a natural bond between their personality and
object of longstanding studies – let it be English. More sensitive become
poets, novelists or songwriters.
But... Have you ever had any
strange attitude toward poliglotes? What do force them to deepen the knowledge of
five , six or fifteen languages? Should it be only a dry pragmatism or need to extend
the number of hypothetic smalltalkers? Or maybe is that a constant research for
an appropriate method to express themselves - unconscious and, for some, never
accomplished but resembles never-ending and rather spiritual exercise of
joining the soul with the body. Sounds philosophically legit!
Now, I would like you to imagine the man who sacrified all his life for learning foreign languages being aware of his complete internal desintegration. He knows English,
German, Norvegian, Swedish, Polish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Urdu,
Hungarian, Russian. Moreover he has recently experienced few lessons of Chinese
and Korean. Ironically our seeker would feel emptiness and misunderstanding till the
end of his life. Why? Oh that’s easy – the language of his mind was FANAGALO - ‘pidgin based on English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, and Zulu, used
especially in the mines of South Africa’.....
Going a little bit further – what
if our internal misunderstanding influences deeply relationships with other
people? How many wars and conflicts could have been avoid if we’d known how to
express our sensitivity, Adolf Hitler singing psalms in Hebrew as an antidote
for the Holocoust? (That’s seems to be a
home-grown historiosophy, oh yess)
Isn’t the idea of the Babel Tower
more convincing now?
I don’t know, but personally, I
feel convinced to practice Portuguese grammar instead of supporting my hopeless
English geist ..
