Languages and barriers thereof

A few days ago I received an e-mail that had an interesting question.

> I'm wondering, how have you learned English so well?

Well, It's not so easy to say. Fact is, that I have studied English in school since the third grade, that is, when I was 9 years old, but public schools never provide very in-depth education.. more of a "general knowledge" -sort. I've always had a certain adaptation ability to foreign languages, and even at young age, I've been able to comprehend other languages quite fast when listening to conversations. Especially so, if there is a translation available.

Being understood by others is often one of the basic necessities of life. If you can't communicate, it's very hard to convey your wishes to other people and interact with them. Language barriers are often very real obstacles between people. Imagine a Japanese man getting stuck in an elevator with a German man. If neither of them speaks the other's language at all, they would have a very hard time waiting for rescue without possibility of conversation. Being stuck with another person and not being able to communicate is one of the most annoying situations imaginable.

I've always wanted to speak as good English as possible, and I try to enlarge my vocabulary all the time. Many of the words I use would probably seem quaint to most of the people.. with the exception of those who speak pure Oxford English, which is in its whole, quite quaint. Reading books in other languages is good training, and a good dictionary is an irreplacable asset. If you are interested in a language, it's not so difficult to pick up new words and phrases.

I think speaking a language is a form of art, and being eloquent and word-ready never hurt anyone. Thus, I use words and phrases more complicated than most, and feel truly ashamed every time I hear Mika Häkkinen speak "English" in TV.. With no idea whatsoever about correct
pronouciation he should really get himself a good teacher and learn to speak properly. Otherwise, he should have enough common sense to shut up and not make an ass aout of himself. I just hope that his style of speech will not be generalized to be that of all Finns.

Well.. most Finns do speak that way, so maybe it doesn't matter. It just vexes me to hear such rape of language. It's basically the same with finlandssvenka. Swedish is a beautiful language, and it has a very distinctive lilting sound to it, but most Finns, who speak Swedish, use an
awful lot of Finnish words directly inserted to Swedish sentences and as to their pronounciation, *CENSORED*. The language is Swedish, but they speak it like Finnish and it sounds just awful.

Maybe I'm just odd to think that every language should be spoken as correctly as possible.. (And, as a disclaimer: I don't see my English as perfect, far from it. I make mistakes and I do that often. I make typos and misspellings like anybody else, but hey, I'm learning) To be understood is, of course, the most important thing, but for me, it doesn't stop there. I have no objections to dialects or slang, but being able to use complicated sentences in stead of just "Me Tarzan. You Jane. Enough talk, now Zorg kill." is to be treasured. The richness of a language is in nuances and figures of speech, understanding idioms and puns. It makes everything just a lot more fun. Being able to understand wordplay in a movie in a way that could never be translated, or sensing the "hidden" emotions behind carefully selected words in stead of just understanding the litteral meaning of the words, being blind to what lies between the lines.

Everybody should learn more languages. Five is a good number to aim for, seven is even better. Some speak more than nine languages fluently and there is little chance that they would ever get in trouble anywhere in the World for not being able to communicate with others.

Fragile

If there was a word for the last weekend (Sana viikonvaihteeksi) It would have to be fragile.

We attended the funeral of my girlfriend's grandmother. Being in a traditional Greek Orthodox funeral was a new experience for me. I think it is appropriate to explain some terms and traditions to those, who are new to the concept. In Greek Orthodox church it is traditional to hold services called panihida for those, who have passed on. This is usually done once a year. The panihida is a requiem, or a soul mass, where people pray that the souls of their relatives, parted from this world, would find their way to peace and eternal rest and bliss. The Orthodox funeral is basically the same, but the departed is participating in the service, as he/she is laid in an open coffin in the church and priests sing their prayers and people pay their last respects by the side of the coffin.

I have never actually seen a dead person before. I've attended many funerals, but all with a closed coffin. The fact that you see the deceased makes it all more concrete, more absolute than just looking at the surface of pleated silk or polished wood of the coffin. You can feel the death's presence on a gut level. Seeing an old woman, years wasted away in a hospital bed, makes you think. Her crooked hands, her whoole body, seemed brittle, as if all the essence in it had been drained away, so light and spidery.. in a word, fragile.

The human mind is also fragile. The relatives try to compose themselves and stoically stand in reverence, and then at the time of final good-bye, those fragile defences collapse, as the tears will themselves out. You can see how shattered the person is inside despite the calm outer image he/she is trying to project. It makes you appreciate what sanity you have left yourself. Later, people are bickering and blaming each other for not having made the arrangements properly, or whatever reason, in futile attempts to vent their own discomfort.

I don't fear death as such, but I dislike funerals. Tragedies tend to bring out the worst in people and funerals are often very fatiguing, both mentally and physically, even if you are not a close relative to the deceased yourself.

We also paid a visit to a friend of ours in hospital. A younger brother of another friend. He had been on his way home on Wednesday night, when he had slipped on the very doorstep of the building he lives in. The building is old, and has beautiful old oak-framed doors with small glass panels in between. The granite stairs in front of the door were icy and slippery and he lost his foothold and fell forward, through the door. Or, more precisely, through one or two of the glass windows. He managed to raise his arms to protect his face, and sustained several deep cuts and severed the arteries in both of his arms. He also damaged the elbow nerve of his left arm and cut seven of his finger tendons. All by one shard of glass to the wrist. Luckily he managed to ring some of the doorbells and get some elderly woman to open her door and call an ambulance. He was operated for five hours and was doing quite well on Saturday despite all. The human body truly is fragile. The boy is only 14 years old, and could easily have died, if he hadn't had help so quickly. He lost something like one liter of blood. (That's one quarter of a gallon for you not familiar with the metric system) That's over a fifth of what he has. I'm really glad he survived.

So, this weekend has been a thought-raiser. Thoughts of how fragile all things are, and how fortunate I am, considering. They say time will heal all wounds, but the process is long and painful. It's true for all wounds, both physical and otherwise.

I hope my next update will be of happier things.