Il filosofo Wittgenstein disse:
I limiti della nostra lingua sono i limiti del nostro mondo.
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?