version

Well-known member
How many languages can you speak? Are you able to flick between them seamlessly? Did learning another language influence your first language in any way? Do you ever find yourself thinking in your other languages?
 

entertainment

Well-known member
Danish is tiny. English offers much more nuance, phrases and idiosyncrasies. Just more words in general, I guess.

Doing most of my reading and writing in English is really retarding my vocabulary and sophistication in danish. I substitute in English words and phrases all the time and sound like an idiot.

When I think in English and have to articulate it in Danish, all I see are the deficits inthe language. Obviously if I thought in Danish from the beginning, I would make my way around those holes.

I think my writing sounds better in English but not speaking it daily, there's also the effect of being deaf to bad turns of phrase. Cliches and that.
 
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entertainment

Well-known member
Girlfriend speaks Japanese, English and Danish in that order. Says she doesn't think in language. I can't begin to understand that.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
I've no idea. I was very critical about it at first. Didn't believe it. But 'unsymbolized thinking' is apparently a thing.
 

version

Well-known member
I guess once you have several languages knocking about in your head it loosens things up a bit.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
In this schizophrenia book I'm reading, patients describe words as becoming opaque, losing their symbolic meaning, becoming solid objects. Sounds terrifying.
 

version

Well-known member
That sensation of repeating or rereading a word until it no longer makes sense is unnerving. It's like unraveling a ball of string or picking at a scab.
 

version

Well-known member
“I grieve to think that closeness requires some measure of distance as its preserver, if only as a safety measure, because it certainly seems as if connection, in a deeper sense, introduces a specter of estrangement; for to come into contact with someone is to change her—there is that certainty; it reminds me of a game that Robin told me about told me about one day after school, as we were walking down Annatta Road certainly twenty years ago: find a word, a familiar word, on a page, and then stare at it for a while, just let your eyes linger upon it; and soon enough, sometimes after no more than a few seconds, the word comes to look misspelled, or badly transcribed, or as if there are other things wrong with it; so I tried it once, with the most familiar word there is: love, first verb in the Latin primer, the word known to all men; and after no more than five seconds I could swear that it wasn't the same word I had always known: it looked odd, misshapen, and as if it had all kinds of different pronunciations, except the one I had always believed was correct, and had always used; and so there was dissonance... ”

-- Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook
 

entertainment

Well-known member
That sensation of repeating or rereading a word until it no longer makes sense is unnerving. It's like unraveling a ball of string or picking at a scab.

Yeah that's exactly how I imagined that schizo thing. It's like disembedding the word from the system grid, taking it out and holding it in your hand. It seizes to mean anything.
 

version

Well-known member
You can do it with anything too. You can stare at your own face in the mirror until it looks unfamiliar.
 

version

Well-known member
I wrestle with the word not being the thing or even the "true name" of the thing a lot atm. It's obviously a very old problem, but that isn't much consolation when you get bogged down in it. The sense that nothing actually has a name is really disorienting.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
Yeah I recognize that. Spoke with a friend who studies philosophy and he said that people were beginning to abandon that Derridean deconstruction a bit because it was impossible to go anywhere from that point. At least I think that was what he said, I didn't understand it all.
 

version

Well-known member
I get the feeling I'm increasingly circling Wittgenstein and will eventually have to read him.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen

Couldn’t help but drop this due to thread title. Given the word virus analogy, it may be one of the reasons why so many podcasts grate. All those superfluous words not really leading anywhere, exceptions provIng the rule. That’s why I liked Burroughs & his take on silence.

Went to a school run by communists. Fortunately, doing Russian gcse was a blessing in disguise. The teacher was uber delicious compared to French & German and where else could you learn “my father works in a factory”, in Russian, pre-internet? Other half is Jewish, so Yiddish is coming along, very slowly.

Entertainment’s first post nails it imho. How often do expressions in our lexicon derive from the subliminal or subconsciously overheard? Juxtapositions arise that don’t always translate very well from here to there and back. Find the Danish aspect interesting because of its direct influence on the very roots of English. Apparently (reference pending) fishing trawler-men from the north east of England occasionally down anchor alongside Danish counterparts & somehow understand each other.

With work, the frontline is language itself. How do you draw experiences out of people where language itself completely breaks down? Again, the ineffability of consciousness. Synchronously, watched Meades on jargon recently. Whatever you think of the prick, his take on slang was actually fun, squaring it directly against jargon.

Been a long day.
 

version

Well-known member
The second part of the Burroughs quote about language being a virus really stuck with me...

The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.

I can dampen it a bit, but I can faintly hear the name of anything I look at in the back of my mind. I can't completely shut it off. That may be a good thing though. I imagine silencing it completely could cause problems..
 
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