by Bárbara Rodriguez
The limits of my language are the limits of my world - Ludwig Wittgenstein
What if you were given a different set of eyes and you could see the world differently? What if we saw colours as shapes, shapes as textures and textures as plain white surfaces? Languages behave in a similar way.
I was six or seven years old the first time I heard someone speaking in a different language than mine. I was with my father watching the Olympics and a reporter was asking some questions to a Swedish swimmer. Even though it was being simultaneously interpreted, I could not help but listening to the original voice… I was enthralled by the sounds that person could make! I became fascinated about languages ever since that moment. When I had the chance to learn a foreign language formally, I was 19 years old and, what caught my attention the most was the fact that certain words or expressions could be roughly (or sometimes not even) translated. It was as if, all of a sudden, you had to learn to see colours as shapes… Learning a foreign language also helped me become aware of how my native language worked; my second language acted as a mirror in which I could reflect my native one. I understood that what we, Argentines, saw (and therefore understood) as textures were plain surfaces in other languages and vice versa. Nevertheless, the second language I learnt, English, turned out to be rather approachable: it’s a language which is all pervasive in media, the cinema, music. So, after taking “Introduction to Linguistics” back at teaching training college, I came up with the idea of learning a language which was completely strange to me, to my country, to my culture: I began learning Russian. This helped me a lot with my teaching. I was again in my students’ shoes, feeling at a lost at times and trying to imitate and deconstruct how that new set of eyes saw the world.
Something so pervasive as the language we speak is almost never thought of in everyday life. As often said, fish never talk or think about water; people who do not belong to the field of linguistics hardly ever think about the language they speak. Language is thought as a given, and wherever you stand, you think of it as a norm. However, languages give us the chance to see through the eyes of other people’s lives, other cultures, and other ways of constructing reality.