tbh in general language becomes better if you don’t speak it fluently
nobody asked but I’m going to elaborate anyway. if the room a language gives you is too small to express what you need you are forced to make dents in its sides, to press against its walls until they buldge and sagg and make more space. you create new ways in which to say the same old things which is what poets have been bending over backwards to try and do for millenia
Julia Kristeva, from an interview with Ina Lipkowitz and Andrea Loselle (November 1985), as featured in Julia Kristeva Intervews
[Text ID: At the same time, from my studies in modern literature, I became interested in the borderline situation of language, the situation where language reaches its limits.]
“The Chomskians viewed the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as the vilest slander—not just incorrect, but hateful, like saying that different races had different IQs. Because all languages were equally complex and identically expressive of reality, differences in grammar couldn’t possibly correspond to different ways of thinking. “Thought and language are not the [same] thing,” the professor said […]
In my heart, I knew that Whorf was right. I knew I thought differently in Turkish and in English—not because thought and language were the same, but because different languages forced you to think about different things. Turkish, for example, had a suffix, -miş, that you put on verbs to report anything you didn’t witness personally. You were always stating your degree of subjectivity. You were always thinking about it, every time you opened your mouth.
[…]
There were things about -miş that I liked: it had a kind of built-in bewilderment, it was automatically funny. At the same time, it was a curse, condemning you to the awareness that everything you said was potentially encroaching on someone else’s experience, that your own subjectivity was booby-trapped and set you up to have conflicting stories with others. It compromised and transformed everything you said. It actually changed the verb tense you used. And you couldn’t escape. There was no way to go through life, in Turkish or any other language, making onlyfactual statements about direct observations. You were forced to us -miş, just by the human condition—just by existing in relation to other people.”
A Ptolemaic era stele with carved text made up of three translations of a single passage: two in Egyptian language scripts (hieroglyphic and Demotic) and one in the classical Greek of the country’s Greek rulers. It was created in 196 BC, discovered by the French in 1799 at Rosetta, and transported to England in 1802. Once in Europe, it contributed greatly to the deciphering of the principles of hieroglyphic writing, through the work of the British scientist Thomas Young and the French scholar Jean-François Champollion. Comparative translation of the stone assisted in understanding many previously undecipherable examples of hieroglyphic writing. The text on the stone is a decree from Ptolemy V, describing the repeal of various taxes and instructions to erect statues in temples.
