How do you feel when you find yourself in a country where you don’t understand the language? I hate it. Surrounded by signs I cannot make out and people whose conversations make no sense, I tend to feel unsettled and a bit apprehensive, even though I know I can get by with a bit of English everywhere. Perhaps the scariest travel experience I’ve had was hearing some guy barking orders in German over the PA system. (Who wouldn’t, to be honest?) A very stressful situation when you have a flight to catch. I don’t think it’s a coincidence we got fined for having the wrong tickets on the train in Germany and Hungary, countries whose languages I don’t understand at all. Besides the hefty fines, what annoyed me was the complete disdain for the stupid foreigner who doesn’t speak the local tongue. There was a certain meanness, like we were being punished for something more than what was obviously an honest mistake.
According to the Bible, God confounded the languages of the people of Babel when he saw that together they were strong and could build a tower to reach heaven. We were cursed with not understanding each other, which only leads to hating and fighting each other.
Here, in Romania, and I suspect in other small nations as well, knowing foreign languages always marked you as a learned person. Even in politics it is customary to attack your opponents for not speaking foreign language or speaking them badly. ‘How will this guy defend our interests when he doesn’t speak English?’ Obviously, we have interpreters to facilitate a dialogue, but honestly I don’t think it’s the same.
For instance, when you hear Trump saying ‘our country’ you can judge the intensity in his tone of voice. You can feel the meaning. However, when you hear Putin saying ‘наша страна’ you won’t be able to distinguish the words or the intensity behind them. All you’ll hear will the bland voice of the interpreter who doesn’t give a crap about Russia. What you’ll miss is the fact that Putin loves his country just as much as Trump does (or says to, but that’s a different story.) A few months back, Tucker Carlson sat down with Russian FM Sergey Lavrov, a fine diplomat with an outstanding career. Not surprisingly, he spoke very good English, being thus in a position to gauge an American counterpart’s statements. I don’t know how many at the State Department are fluent in Russian.
I believe our fascination with people who speak foreign languages comes from very distant times, from our pre-history and is based exactly on this need to assess friends and foes. If a primitive understood the tongue of their nearest neighbor they could learn whether they meant them harm or, indeed, they were someone you could depend on come next mammoth-hunting season. Our ancestors discovered early on that together they were strong, something God apparently did not appreciate so he scrambled our languages, making us forever mistrustful of each other.
Is knowing another people’s language enough? Well, it improves your survival chances, but it doesn’t make you one of them. The history running through your veins is different and you don’t share in their part of the collective unconscious. On these levels, you’re different, you’re still Other. As I was saying in previous posts, part of my family were foreigners to this land, they were Others and we still carry this otherness two generations later.
Most sci-fi universes have a common tongue as a core tenet. If we’re to spread out in the Universe, we need to do this as humans, speaking the same language. Given the current American cultural dominance it will probably be some form of English. Much easier to learn than Chinese. What bothers me is that English is not a language of peace. Not now at least. I think that it would be a great mistake to adopt, together with the language, the disdain for other cultures Americans have been indoctrinated with.
Images are my own.