In the book "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" Yuval Noah Harari insists that language — and our ability to spin fictions — enabled our earliest ancestors to come together and establish civilizations. Today there are over 7,000 languages spoken around the world. Each one is guided by its own set of rules, sounds, vocabularies and structures that have the capacity to touch us profoundly and stir memories or, at their very worst, wound us. In other words, through this alchemy of sounds and symbols, we are able to communicate not just the essentials but also the intangible. If language proved to be an organizing principle for modern humans, some might consider the ability to speak more than one akin to having a second soul. In a recent guest essay, Natalia Sylvester tells us how growing up bilingual empowered her to "break barriers beyond the rules and definitions attached to words." When Sylvester moved to Miami from Peru, she spoke Spanish at home, while English dominated the hours spent at school. But as the lines between the two languages began to blur, she realized that "we can expand language to include the full breadth of our experiences." At the same time, there are sometimes words that may feel truer in one language than in another. These "home" and "heart" words can carry emotional weight that imbue them with a deeper meaning. For example, a maleta, or suitcase, for Sylvester evokes the flavors, textures and memories of her birthplace. That's in part because language is driven by memory and context. After all, she writes, "words are just sounds and letters until we collectively give them meaning through story."
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Tuesday, April 16, 2024
Opinion Today: Sometimes the perfect word isn’t available in English
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