Speak My Language?

Warning Language Tangent

I interviewed a gent’ from Scotland today and I was propelled with excitement because he seemed like an honestly good fit for my company, and interesting to boot. The kid is taking Spanish, French and Cinema. I won’t lie; I’m interested to see what he is going to do with his life.

Languages are so unique, not only in how we communicate but express ourselves. I am always intrigued when people know how to speak more than one. I’m not as articulate as I would like to be when I am talking with others, but I’ve always thought language was something you would never stop learning.

Even insults are unique between cultures, in German, for example if you were to call someone “a big monkey” (eine grosse Affe), that would be more insulting that a string of German swear words. In English the reverse would be true. Sadly, this is the best excuse that comes to mind right now. Other than in German and Italian, all nouns and some adjectives have a gender, which confuses my mind way too much.

English is supposedly, one of the most difficult languages to master, which I’m sure, is easier to believe, if unlike me, you haven’t spoken it your whole life. But when you start assigning nouns a gender, and there is suddenly 20 different spellings of the word “the”, I’d then like to argue that the difficulty of English.

It amuses me because I have no idea how I ever learned to understand written English. At one point I’m sure, pronouns, proper nouns, adverbs, conjunctions ect. were all properly explained to me. However now, if I were to pick apart a sentence longer than five words, I’m not sure I could categorize each word properly. My professors have tried to teach other languages similarly (pronoun, adverb ect.), and I’m too busy translating to realize whether “brutto” is an adjective or adverb in Italian. My Italian is a little rusty and I only had a semester so it’s only cosi-cosi (so-so).  

I like how different languages emphasize different things as well. In German, every noun except “I” is capitalized, in English, locations, people, days of the week, months, and languages are all capitalized. In Italian, names of people, days/months, and locations (not store, office ect.) are capitalized and nothing else.

Gestern, am Dienstag, sah ich Elaine am Lager.

Yesterday, on Tuesday, I saw Elaine at the store.

Ieri il Martedì ho visto Elaine presso il negozio.