Il filosofo Wittgenstein disse:
I limiti della nostra lingua sono i limiti del nostro mondo.
Spesso, ci sentiamo costretti ad imparare una lingua nuova e vediamo ciò come un’incombenza, un compito. Così l'apprendimento di una nuova lingua diventa un lavoro quando invece dovrebbe essere un piacere e soprattutto, un dono. La bellezza del linguaggio si trova nei piccoli e nei grandi cambiamenti che ci comporta. Pensare, parlare e scrivere usando un altro linguaggio cambia non solo il nostro modo di vedere il mondo, ma anche noi stessi. Ogni parola che impareremo ci porterà sempre più vicino a oltrepassare i nostri limiti.
I originally wrote this in an e-mail as a bit of inspiration for my English students after having seen the film Arrival. I whole-heartedly believe in this, that language is a gift and that it is something that is ever-evolving, ever-changing, and thus, our relationship with it is entirely dynamic. Italian makes me see the world differently, the specificity of each word for one object, yet the absence of certain adjectives that in English are commonplace, the smooth cadence and poetry of Italian that help you visualize the cadence and poetry of the landscape, a glass of wine, the chiming of church bells...For this blog post, I started to translate the text to English but I stopped. It wasn't right in English, the way it is written in Italian. And so I will leave it as is, unscathed by the rules and restrictions of one language on another. The photos that I chose to accompany this post are five years old, taken when I was studying Italian at the University of Alberta. I can actually spot an error now, looking back. Just a testament to the fact that we never stop learning do we?
I originally wrote this in an e-mail as a bit of inspiration for my English students after having seen the film Arrival. I whole-heartedly believe in this, that language is a gift and that it is something that is ever-evolving, ever-changing, and thus, our relationship with it is entirely dynamic. Italian makes me see the world differently, the specificity of each word for one object, yet the absence of certain adjectives that in English are commonplace, the smooth cadence and poetry of Italian that help you visualize the cadence and poetry of the landscape, a glass of wine, the chiming of church bells...For this blog post, I started to translate the text to English but I stopped. It wasn't right in English, the way it is written in Italian. And so I will leave it as is, unscathed by the rules and restrictions of one language on another. The photos that I chose to accompany this post are five years old, taken when I was studying Italian at the University of Alberta. I can actually spot an error now, looking back. Just a testament to the fact that we never stop learning do we?
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