We are what we speak

Today in Spanish class we learned about the verbs "to be." Yes, there are two. One, ser, describes permanent states of being, things like character, nationality, professions, personhood. Estar, on the other hand, represents life's more fleeting moments: moods, feelings, the weather, and, interestingly, all locations. You may remember this confusing you in high school Spanish. Native speakers, of course, don't make ser/estar errors, even as young children, just as they never mistake the gender of a noun or adjective. To them, a table is feminine, an arm is masculine, and describing the weather naturally evokes a temporary sense of being. Hispanic kindergartens may misconjugate verbs or mess up pronunciations like kindergartners everywhere, but deeper concepts like gender and ser/estar are burned into their minds in a different way. (At least according to my Spanish teacher.) Noam Chomsky and his linguistic ilk love to talk about how our mother tongue shapes the way we think (rather than vice versa), burrowing passages into our physical brains, so that the neural pathways of, say, a native Chinese speaker are actually different than the neural pathways of a German or Peruvian. It's one of the most fascinating concepts in the world, when you think about it. Language as a universal human trait but the languages themselves making us all fundamentally different. Such a small step from the concrete reality of nouns and verbs into the metaphysical realm of what makes us tick--and the lengths we may have to go to ever truly understand one another.

I love the thought of native Spanish speakers existing in a reality where there is an unmistakable linguistic difference between the permanent and the temporary. When I learned about it today in class, I immediately wanted to translate it into English. It's impossible. If it's sunny outside, I can only say: It is sunny today. I can't imply with my verb choice that it is sunny now but may not be tomorrow. Or later. Or even in the next minute. I could use a lot of words to describe the weather's temporary nature. I could say: It's sunny right now, but who knows, really? Or I could say something that sounds either obvious or depressing, but might be the closest translation of estar by remarking: It won't be sunny forever. This may be why some languages (or people who speak certain languages) are sometimes accused of being dour or fatalistic. In English, the present just is. In other languages, like Spanish, negotiating the present requires a bit more analysis.

English is very concrete. We have so many words--way more than any other language in the world. I still think this is very cool, but I used to think it was cooler. As I learn more about other languages, I realize how much we Anglophones depend on our vocabulary. We need a lot of words to say what we really mean, words that other languages slip into other parts of speech. One of my favorite French words is meme, which is both an adjective and an adverb. It is a damn useful word, one with no English equivalent, or at least none as elegant. Meme means same. But it also can mean self. It can also mean the actual or center of something, a way to emphasize an essential characteristic. If I said something was Texas-meme, I'd mean it was the very essence of Texas-ness. In English, I'd have to explain (That was so Texas. I mean, totally and completely a reflection of the whole state. Seriously.) In French, I'd just say it was Texas-meme, and the implied meaning would be there, built into those four letters. It's just as cool as having the world's most robust thesaurus (as English does) or two verbs that mean to be.

You may think, given my enthusiasm for linguistics, that I'm someone who learns languages easily and with unmitigated pleasure. This is actually not the case. I live so steeped in my own language that learning another is deeply unsettling, like being in another dimension where none of the rules apply. But the traveler in me likes the voyage, in theory: the understanding that can be gained by visiting, even temporarily (go estar!) someone else's world view.

(If you have any cool linguistics elements of a language you speak, please share!)