A Perspective on the English Language Explorative Thoughts and Assorted Musings

A Perspective on the English Language
Explorative Thoughts and Assorted Musings

“French is such a beautiful language,” a friend said to me not so long ago. “So rich and colored compared to English. English is not interesting. It’s just a mix of whatever is more convenient, a bastard child, a whore of a language.”

Is it time to eat yet? I thought to myself, nodding in approval.

The thing with language is that it goes way further than clusters of syllables and phonemes. Language is the testimony of our humanity, the witness of our rises and falls, defining what we are. Its forms and expressions are infinite. Words, logos, pictures, sheet music, mathematics, everything we produce is language because language stands at the foundation of everything. It is what makes us humans. It is what makes us.

By extension, language is also the main carrier of cultural differentiation. Where French would be virtually perfect for writing about France, English will be best suited for writing about America.

English is a language of wide-open spaces, closely related to the landscape. It is a language of pioneers and extremes. It is teasing and it is prude, it is extrovert and it is intricate. It has evolved to suit the places it is spoken in, especially in the US because English echoes America’s contradictions and battles — battles between liberalism and conservatism, poverty and wealth, freedom and control, battles between geographical features, even, with deserts and mountains spreading around cities and through the uncharted lands of yore.

English gets to a whole new level of ambition due to the very roots of its evolution. As waves of immigrants flooded the American, Australian and South African colonies, English expanded and became a much different language than the one used back in England. It continues today to playfully steal everything it needs from other languages, borrowing from French, German, Spanish, Italian, Yiddish and building an ever-growing mass of potential significance, ready to unleash as much sense as needed in any particular situation. Because it basically works as a developing database, English is able to express a virtually unlimited array of things in the simplest way possible.

French on the other hand is a narrower language. Its Latin roots made it very rigid and prone to immutability. French doesn’t like change because change simply doesn’t work well with such a substantial tongue. Its roots are too far down, its history too deeply ingrained to dig out and replace. French language doesn’t move much. Like a rock, it’s always been there in one form or another and will slowly erode until nothing is left of it. You can feel the weight of the wars on its shoulders, the weariness and the lassitude in its tired breathes.

France is a small country with a constrained territory. Villages are spread out but never very far from a city. And apart from a few, cities are fairly small. Exploration has never been a necessity here. It has not been entrenched in the collective mind. And so the French language stalls and coughs and dies by lack of an evolutionary need. Experiments are seldom, limited to a couple of very unique cases. Where English thrives at incorporating other languages, French just gets incorporated.

The result of this rigidity is that writing about America in French literally doesn’t make sense. The dimension is not there. The hidden nuances get lost in translation. The cultural distinctions will vary too much to convey anything else than lifeless words and letters. The underlying meanings will be blurred, leaving only the empty shell of dead sentences without impact.

Of course, French people talk and write about the US all the time. They give opinions and make comparisons — the French always have lots of opinions on a lot of things. But they cannot grasp the sense of it all. It’s just not in their genes, I guess. They were born learning an already-made language, preventing them from completely understanding what was concealed within the New World.

Eventually, the handicaps of one language could be seen as the benefits of the other. How could always-evolving English keep any traction if it cannot stop changing? At least French knows steadiness, which should warrant its survival and legacy.

But isn’t the nature of humanity profoundly unstable? Isn’t culture a continuous evolution, a stream of informative processes staying in motion not to die?

Using French to write about America sure can be refreshing or romantic, but in the end the sense will be amiss, producing statements devoid of content.

Every language is naturally bound to be locked in its own cell and isolated from the others. The point here is that some languages manage to escape those cells and freely roam across the world, casually incorporating the scope of the land and society into their cores. There are no better languages per se, only better adapted languages.

This is why I replied to my friend, “French may be nice, but English saved its ass twice already.”

This is why I keep writing and stumbling and lumbering, talking to the words until they talk back to me — the misfit, the oddball, with his tongue in the mouth of a whore of a language and his eyes full of the never-ending stories of the latter men