Words

Language fascinates me.

Have you ever stopped to think about the fact that we're able to communicate?

I mean, clearly, most of what we do has language as a vital part. All of this -- the internet, blogging, computers -- requires language. We need to communicate with one another. We need to communicate with machines. We need to communicate with our selves. How could anything have developed at all without communication?

I stare at all of the books lining my shelves, and I'm astounded. I can't imagine life without them. All of these languages, too; I have books in three or four languages on my shelves. The Tower of Babel was always one of the most intriguing stories to me. Can you imagine being able to communicate fully and universally? I certainly can't. I can't even fully communicate with many people who ostensibly speak English -- many of my peers don't even know what 'ostensibly' means.

Shades of meaning are what really define communication for me, though. Connotation is the best part of writing. In my search for a title to one of my posts from yesterday, I translated the word 'time' to Latin on an online translation service. It gave me a number of results (vicis, tempus temporis, tractus, hora, aetas), so I decided to translate them back to English to figure out exactly what they meant. They all were yielded to me in a search for 'time', but they all had very different meanings. 'Tractus', the word I decided on, means 'a dragging, drawing, pulling, territory, tract, space, time, lapse, extension, length, course, progress, movement'. If you read the other post, that's absolutely perfect. Exactly what I meant by 'time'. However, one of the other words I translated, also technically meaning time, was 'aetas'. Aetas means 'an age, stage, period of life, time, era'. Each of these might mean time, but they're so, so different. Precision of language, to me, is the most important part of communicating.

Hebrew has these phrases that are just so perfect for some things. It's a language well entrenched in religion, of course, so it has sayings from that. There's a proverb that goes something like this: "Everyone should keep two pieces of paper on them, one in each pocket. As things happen, one should pull out one or the other. One should say 'Anochi afar va'efer' and the other should say 'Bash'vili nevareh ha'olam'; 'I am but dust and ashes' and 'For my sake the whole world was created'." 'Dust' and 'ashes' are the same word, letter by letter, in Hebrew. And our language is filled with words like that, and phrases that do not bare with literal translation to any other language.

I once heard that the Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow. I've since heard that it's fewer than that, but still much more than the one we have. Because their culture requires them to have all of the words, for the sake of precision of language and good communication, they have them. The same is true of artists. In English, there are hundreds of different words for colors, but most people only know a few of the more basic ones. An artist would be able to identify, and subsequently remember, different colors because of the different names that a slightly different color can have.

And don't even get me started on tone.