The same could be said of social relationships when integrating long term into a very different linguistic group, culture, and mindset. Then, after half your life there, to go back to the old hometown place and try to integrate. Here again, language is far from a simple tool of communication. Mode of communication, thoughts, values, intent and so on are completely different. Although you come back to something distantly familiar, regardless of how sincerely loved ones try to help bridge the chasm, they simply have no idea who you are, how you think, etceteras. - Bill "When you become a writer, you don’t do so in abstract, but in relation to a certain language. . . . The world reveals itself in a certain manner to the Japanese writer, and in quite another to the one who writes in Finnish. A writer’s language is not just something she uses, but a constitutive part of what she is. This is why to abandon your native tongue and to adopt another is to dismantle yourself, piece by piece, and then to put yourself together again, in a different form. . . . In a certain sense, it could be said that in the end you don’t really change languages; the language changes you."
Posted on: Sat, 10 Aug 2013 07:35:52 +0000
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