Cunning Nowhere

In the south of China, I have learned to speak the Hokkien dialect. As I am a red(well, pale yellow)-haired barbarian, I cannot adequately reproduce the sounds of a famous profanity. But I have taken it as my own. You need to use your imagination, my dear Hokkien friends. Guds hjælp, Folkets kærlighed, Danmarks styrke, Kynings havn.

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

language barrier

Hwæt! I hear from my friends in that place, one or two students from their school are complaining my language is becoming worse. This is not a good thing. I am trying very hard but it is not easy simply because it is too easy. Dansk, it is a language which is predecessor tongue to the American, which is modern offshoot of Shakespeare's English. So even though I did well at UCLA and can speak English very fluently, when I am not checking too much, I am not so good.

The thing is idiom. My language professor always saying that language with wrong idiom is not idiomatic, is idiotic. And also the grammar structure is confused, is a fusion of first language and second language is a descendant of first, and modification in third-party software.

But now I am learning Icelandic, and it is retro-confusing! Learning Hokkien is more easily done (easier done?) because is not related at all, so translation is translation. It is not carrying semantic meaning round and round like baggage and it does not make sense transplanted out of linguistic context. Never mind, I am incoherent now from marking too many humanities papers. Oh, paper humanity, will you ever be growing up to be more than paper?

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