A few notes on language:
It’s impressive to watch people switch from one language to another in conversation.
Pretty much everyone on this project speaks from native or fluent to at least functional English – which is a relief for a mono-linguist like me. It’s just so embarrassing not to be able to communicate in another language.
Commonly, people will communicate in English, or revert to Russian if it’s a common language, switch to Lithuanian for chit chat.
Some people appear to be more comfortable speaking English than they really are and will rely on others to translate for them. I’d probably end up doing the same, if I had more than my own, English, sadly lacking as it is in clarity.
Despite there being three Americans on this project, it became clear that I was the native English speaker who is most difficult to understand. I speak very quickly by habit, for a start (I know this already). More interestingly, (I hadn’t realised this) I use, without thinking, a lot of idiomatic words and expressions that just don’t make any sense to someone who isn’t familiar with them. Americans don’t.
Having begun to write this, I should now give some examples, but I can’t actually think of any. I’ll have to start taking notes.
So is idiomatic language a bad thing? Is it insular and exclusive, keeping out anyone who isn’t in the know? (There you go, there’s one.) I think of Cadogan, Greenwich and Southwark and it makes me shudder (yep, Tom asked me yesterday if I knew the South-Wark cyclists – and I can remember mis-pronouncing it when I first arrived in London and thinking what a poncy thing it was to have words that are pronounced completely differently to how they’re spelt).
Words and expressions can be such a simple pleasure. But I need to think before I speak (as it was ever thus).
On the look-out for locations today – both of my team-mates are away (for a baptism and a wedding). Was delighted to find the Viva Esperanto mark. Esperanto was invented in the 19th Century by Ludwik Łazarz Zamenhof, a Pole of Lithuanian Jewish descent. He was saddened by the constant arguing between Poles, Germans and Belarussians and figured that a common world language could help people to communicate.
So it was popular round these parts. And hated by Nazis and Stalinists because of its anti-nationalistic tendencies.
So Esperantists were up there with Jews, Roma, homosexuals and partisans (Lithuanian nationalists) on the Nazi/Stalinist hate lists.
