My Super Power

In the seventh grade we had to write an essay about the super power we wanted.  I remember thinking long and hard about this super power.  I didn't, honestly, know a lot about super heroes.  I grew up in a house of all girls and didn't personally watch a lot of cartoons anyway and I feel those two things distanced me from being in the super hero know. Therefore, I'm not sure if what I chose counts as a super power but I can now say that I do believe it is one of the most powerful things.

I wrote that I wanted to be able to speak and understand every language in the word.  My inexperienced self probably thought there might be somewhere around a hundred languages included in this list of EVERY language, little did I know that one day I would live in a country where there are at least that many just there. While living in the Philippines I learned one of their official languages, Tagalog.  Spanish was the official language for many years in the 1800s and through their revolution.  English took over along with Filipino.  I experienced the influence Spanish had on Tagalog, although linguistically the two languages are not similar at all, Tagalog uses many Spanish words. 

This was especially true for me as a missionary teaching about Christ.  It was the Spaniards who brought Christianity to the people and so these kinds of religious terms are often Spanish based because they did not have their own terms for them.  This returns to an idea I've glossed over a few times, language shows values and culture and ingrains identity because it is the way we come to think and the things we do not have words for or have multiple words for express this identity for us. Our language begins to adapt according to our experience. Through my lifetime I can recall experiencing this many times now. 

Through the years right after 9/11 terms like, "terrorist," came much more to the forefront of every day vocabulary than they had been before.  I remember the years that computers didn't even accept the word, "internet" as being spelled correctly and then in college when facebook (still not accepted as being spelled correctly by computers) brought us terms like, "friending,"and probably some better ones that simply aren't coming to my mind right now because they are so natural feeling as they begin to be implemented into our language that it's strange to think of them as not normal once a certain point is reached.

There are a couple different cases here, one where conquest and conquer forced language and culture into a people, others where technology, history, change, experience has added to language.  In all of these instances it appears that it is language adapting to the circumstances placed upon it in order to give a symbol to the experience and begin to describe it in context of the rest of language. It is not the language coming first and making changes but language needing to adapt to changes happening to its people that use language to understand these experiences.

This is why language learning is, partially, so interesting to me.  The ability to learn the history of a people is tied up inside the language they have and the way they use it, and even how it has been changed over time and this is something I wanted to do even as a very young child. It is in the second language learning sector that identity change comes into play, and culture learning and adapting.  A first language can grow and change through a person's life and it is these changes that shape and make up how a person explains their identity with the world and even teaches them what to identify with by naming it, naming terrorism and from that point having a new set of vocabulary to use in explaining those experiences around 9/11. Learning a new language, however, does not change your identity, may not even change behavior at all (though as I've discussed before to truly communicate in another language it requires a certain degree of cultural understanding and adaptation bu this still does not need to require actual deep set change) but what it does is expand the scope of understanding and connection a person can have with another group of people.

All these thoughts were coming to me as I watched the video about translating and back translating.  The woman wished she had a babel fish and this fish reminded me a bit of my own seventh grade desire to understand all languages, I didn't want language to be a barrier, but a connector. Her findings were interesting, the terms they did not have or even the ideas or concepts the people she was living with did not have an how it was demonstrated in the translations of her questions from English into their language. It is these kinds of differences I'm interested in trying to find and analyze.

I have a final thought on language for the day, I should probably split all these thoughts up and construct them into smaller and more thorough thoughts, but I'll just get it out here for now.  I feel like a lot of my blogging sessions are like massive brainstorming sessions I'll need to keep returning to. As for my last thought, I took a linguistics class taught by a director of the missionary training center and he asked why we thought God, who wants all His children to know the truth, make it so difficult for us to understand one another by binding our languages? We were asking the question in terms of missionary work, specifically, and so I didn't go into the scriptures or the account of it happening or think too much about the specifics but really about the idea of how language separates us and how that doesn't seem to be what God wants, not really anyway.

What I found is that by struggling to learn the language of another people I was struggling to understand and love those people and they knew it. This may not often be the goal of language learners, but I think our differences in language is not so much a curse, in the end, but a blessing from God in the work of spreading his love. By loving and respecting the language of another we are loving and respecting them.  I want to make sure all people I meet know that I love and respect their language, even if I am coming to teach them my language which is the plan with my TESOL minor and the internship I am doing this summer to teach English in India, another country I will now go to with hundreds of languages - oh the things my seventh grade brain never comprehended - but I still wish I had that super power.