October 26, 2008

Esperanto

My brain is very close to saying "no more". And I'm not the only one. In school we speak Polish but make fun of everything and anything in English, I go to work and speak Polish but I sometimes mistake the szklanka for the kufel and require additional information in English, and since the Silesian dialect has so many German words, I need to reactivate the very basics and try to remember what I've been doing during those German classes in the past year, and then of course I go out with Maxi who is my friend-psychologist-computer doctor and it may happen that she starts speaking German with me, and let's not forget French wich is also highly popular, or Russian for that matter, spoken during class by those people who seem to take Polish for granted just because they were born speaking Russian. Oh, I gave up the idea of taking Spanish courses here, but only because the Spanish Philology Department is in Sosnowiec, not in Katowice, and I'm too lazy now and will probably be too cold in winter to take the trip.
I'm afraid there will come a point when I won't find my words anymore, or make a mixture of my own - I have this theory, that we all have an individual language, in which we know all the words, we don't lack any name for any action or object, and this subjective language is a mixture of all the languages we've learnt. Obviously, for full understanding we can only speak it in front of the mirror, because we won't find a perfect match in somebody else's individual language, so I'm beginning to think Esperanto wasn't such a bad idea after all.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Who said it was a bad idea? :-P

Visit Lernu!

Ruxandra said...

I used to think it was a bad idea, and despite the linguistic mess I've been through lately, I'm still not sure Esperanto is the answer :)

Bill Chapman said...

Esperanto can't solve all the world's problems, but it is a fully functioning international language. I've used it for years.