First off, I want to let you, my dear readers, know that my next post after this one is likely to be delayed. My life is quite busy at the moment and so there is likely to be a delay. But rest assured, I will return. I promise.

Which brings me to today’s topic: communication. In particular, I will focus on language, but what I talk about really does apply to communications of other sorts as well.

I had a wonderful discussion with a guy I work with today, where he revealed to me one of the great challenges of learning the French language. It seems there are literally hundreds of dependencies with regard to verbs. So many that even those whose first language is French have a special book that they keep around to help them with conjugating verbs. I believe this book is commonly referred to as a Bescherelle.

When I was learning Japanese, I had to memorize three “alphabets.” These are Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. In truth, however, no one is really able to memorize all Kanji as there are simply too many. Wikipedia suggests “The Dai Kan-Wa Jiten, which is considered to be comprehensive in Japan, contains about 50,000 characters.” The Dai Kan-Wa Jiten is likely to the Japanese, and the Chinese, what a Bescherelle is to the French.

In both these cases, in French and in Japanese specifically, language is not something you simply learn as a child and then you are done. Learning one’s language is an ongoing process that can last one their entire lifetime. Of course one does learn the “basics” and the most common ways of communicating in their youth, but as my Japanese instructor suggested, when reading a newspaper, one is bound to encounter unfamiliar words or characters that need to be looked up, even well into adulthood.

In my case, my first (and so far only) language is English. When I compare how I learned my native tongue, and how much I need to practice it as they years pass, it seems to me that English is in a lot of ways much simpler. However, if I start to think about the various changes to English over my lifetime, so far, perhaps it is not as simple as I might like to think either. With the advent of the Internet and especially of social media, English has seen some pretty dramatic changes in the past decade alone.

Returning to the conversation with my coworker, I had borrowed an online translator to translate some English into French, and asked him to read it over to see if it was alright. He mentioned that the sentence was clearly “anglicised.” That is, while my words were most definitely French words, they were being presented in an obviously English manner. To explain his point, he provided the following example:

In English, if I wish to issue a command for someone to sever power to a ceiling light, I might say “Turn off the light.” In French, I would have translated this to “Éteignez la lumière,” which literally translates to “Extinguish the light.” However, a typical French person would be unlikely to say such a thing. Instead, they might normally say “Fermez la lumière,” which literally translates to “Close the light.” While both sentences are technically correct, and most parties would sufficiently understand the meaning to accomplish the correct task, the point here is that there is a clear difference in thought involved between the person who’s native language is English, and the person who’s native language is French.

This immediately got me thinking about all the strange conversations I have had over the years. The occurrences of what I considered to be weird word choices. In most cases, the person I was talking to spoke many more languages than simply English. And when I was taking my Japanese class, some of these details became more apparent when considering how the language was structured.

In Japanese, there are usually many, many ways to say the same thing. Often times, the sentences sound very, very different, which caused me great difficulty when trying to comprehend what someone else was saying. In Japanese, often these differences in how a sentence is formed has a lot to do with the social differences between the parties. For example, if a student is speaking to a teacher, they would structure their sentences differently than the teacher would when speaking to the student. There is a respect built into the language. How one speaks is conveying much more than simply the meaning of the words, it is often conveying an acknowledgment of social rank as well.

In other words, it seems to me that the language one has learned growing up significantly affects how one thinks and how one interprets the world around them. How one prioritizes certain types of information, or what one focuses on. And this, again, will be revealed through their speech. Their choice of certain words, and how those words are arranged can be incredibly significant.

It also reminded me of Yoda, from Star Wars. One thing Yoda is well known for is the strange way he speaks. And while I am fairly confident George Lucas likely was not thinking in the ways I am presently, it seems to me that perhaps a rational explanation for his unique speech pattern could be explained if English was not his native language as well.

Ultimately, where this drove my conversation with my coworker was that how one speaks may reveal a lot more about a person than merely the content of their words. As he suggested in my attempts at translating English to French, my choices clearly revealed that I was a native English speaker to him, and that French was not a language I was as familiar with. In the same vein as to how some people are able to discern regional dialects from a person’s accent.

Considering how much languages seem to evolve over time, it also seems prudent for each of us to be open minded and charitable when listening to others. If someone’s choice of words, or how those words are organized, seem strange, perhaps it is best to do our very best to try and understand what they are trying to say. As my late father would often say to me, “it is more about the spirit of the law than the word of the law.”