I can only imagine how it must feel like for someone to be enchanted by the word Schlusslicht without having a clue about its meaning. Sometimes I feel proud when I read about how beautiful some find the German language – because I find it beautiful, too.
Actually, I was just about to call English the Schlusslicht of languages in terms of vocabulary. That would make it no less appealing for someone who enjoys stringing words together, but on top of that, it is untrue! This is, at least, what I can state without doing a tremendous amount of research.[i] Vocabulary size is difficult to determine and does not really matter anyways.
But nonetheless I wanted to investigate why I felt this way. Maybe it comes down to the fact that English is just so extraordinary contextual. The word „run“ for example has, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, 645 different meanings depending on the context. The word „take“ may have over a thousand.[ii]
I am no linguist, just a mere lover of words, so I am going to leave it at that. What I find way more interesting, though, is how I feel differently writing in English versus German. On the one hand, there is always this sense of doubt that what I am writing could be just plain wrong. From a grammatical standpoint, or just a native speaker’s gut feeling. But when I can leave those doubts behind, my English-speaking self seems to evolve into a different character. I notice this especially in conversations and some of my polyglot friends told me that they feel similarly.
Why, though? How influenced is my thinking just by my language? Another topic of scientific discussion that we are not going to dive into.[iii] I noticed that I write most of my To-Do lists and project management stuff in English without giving it a second thought. I am certain that I am not the only one doing this, especially amongst my programming friends. In real-life, I seem to be more confident speaking English in a group-setting, whereas in a German-speaking group, I am often the quietest. The reason why is opaque to me.
But what I really want to discover is how my art is different. Therefore, I will be partaking in Ecapril, a yearly poetry challenge during the month of April, hosted by Savannah Brown. My goal is to write in English and German and then to investigate why I was drawn to one or the other. Maybe translating my writing to uncover new ways of thinking. Maybe discovering a shared voice between the two. Will my limited vocabulary limit my creations? Or is a minimalist approach a better fit for me anyways? I am excited to jump in and write stuff! Let’s Escapril!
And maybe there will be a Pt. II to this.
[i] The abstract of the Book “Measuring Native-Speaker Vocabulary Size” by Averil Coxhead from the Victoria University of Wellington includes this: “Unfortunately, the measurement of native-speaker vocabulary size has been one of the most methodologically contentious areas of research in applied linguistics, with estimates of adults’ vocabulary size ranging from 12,000 words to well over 200,000 words.”
Well, if you can write a 166 page book about a topic – a short google search of mine probably won’t do it justice.
[iii] “Language may indeed influence thought“ is the title of a paper by Zlatev and Blomberg, published 2015 in Frontiers of Psychology. Its abstract ends with a classic: “[O]ur discussion and the reviewed literature show that such influence is clearly possible, and hence in need of further investigations.”
[iv] Even though, usually, I’d have many things to add. Oh, how I long for something like these footnotes in conversations. Put a pin in that.
Comments