Foreign Languages
I've been watching Univision lately, and it is the same experience I had when I used to watch a lot of Japanese and Hong Kong movies. It is so fascinating that the people on screen are moving their lips, sound comes out, and the other people know what the speaker meant, while it sounds like gibberish to me. And yet, at one point in my life, I knew no language, yet I learned English from just hearing it. No study program, no books on tape, just waiting around in a crib. I keep thinking that if I sit there watching people speak a language that is foreign to me, that some part of my brain will start translating it - just as it does for English for me and that gibberish for them. Maybe there are no other languages and the world is set up as one giant joke, kind of like that Lost in Translation scene in Ocean's Twelve.
If one never learned a language, would there be a native language of the brain? Say if we raised a few humans separately away from all language then brought them all together, would they speak? If so, would it be the same language? If not the same language, then are any of us actually speaking the same language, since languages like English are really just translations of each persons innate language to a common one?
So, if our inborn languages are all different, unique to each individual, are not all languages foreign? And all of our communications are losing something in the translation?
-Edward
2 comments:
"all of our communications are losing something in the translation"
That goes without saying. I am 100% positive that so much of what I say gets lost in translation.
Now if we were telepathic, hmmm....
Sorry, I didn't quite get that.
I often wonder if we were telepathic how shocked we would be to see the world as others see it... and how they see ourselves!
Maybe we are telepathic, but other people's thoughts seem like background noise to us. But people with similar brain languages get a sense of that, which is why close friends and SOs can often finish each others thoughts... So, who out there knew I was going say that? And are you a chick?
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