Status Updates From Four Words for Friend: Why ...

Living in Paris, and wrestling with the question of whether to write in Greek or French, the novelist Vassilis Alexakis observed how his Vietnamese neighbours drew the line. They spoke to each other in Vietnamese, but they spoke French to the stray cat they had adopted. It was, after all, a native.

The ability to toggle between two languages is about as near as one can get to being in two places at once. And above all, a knowledge of more than one language – even a highly unbalanced knowledge – creates an awareness that in different languages, a myriad details of the world are different. Sometimes conscious, sometimes tacit, sometimes hovering discreetly in the background, this sense of alternatives

Using a foreign language seems to disconnect people from their emotions, and hence their susceptibility to superstitions. A broken mirror made a less vivid image when evoked by a foreign language than by a native tongue. Imagination may be dimmed by foreign languages, which do not connect to the memories people use to create new mental images; feelings and choices may be less coloured by emotion in consequence.

People who live in more than one language often struggle to describe and explain the sensations that arise from moving between them. They welcome being asked if they feel different in different languages, though, because they have asked themselves the same question. In this sense its undoubtedly a real phenomenon. But is it a subjective one? Can observers detect any signs that languages activate changes in behaviour

The English aristocracy copied the French polite plural in the Middle Ages, casting ‘you’ as the distanced form and ‘thou’ as the familiar one. By the middle of the seventeenth century, ‘you’ had driven ‘thou’ out of standard English altogether—possibly because middle-class people now comprised an increasingly influential section of society, but were unsure where they stood in relation to each other

Noah Chomsky transformed linguistics from scholars who had dominated the discipline. Their modus operandi was the collection of data about individual languages. Chomsky dismissed the detail as trivial. "A Martian scientist he observed, might reasonably conclude that there is a single human language with differences only at the margins. Terrestrial scientists' task is to elucidate the universal grammer of the language

If language had a term for one other colour besides black and white that colour invariably was RED..
being able to see a colour may be a vital ability, but being able to name it may be an irrelevance..
The assessment of potential food for example. If fruits look green when unripe and red when ripe or leaves look green when fresh and yellow when dying, it is a lot easier to identify food that is good to eat.

In the area of motion, the difference investigators have found most compelling is between languages whose verbs express the manner of movement and those whose verbs carry information about its path. An English speaker might say ‘the ball rolled out of the box’, for example, a Spanish speaker would say ‘la pelota salió de la caja rodando’, which is roughly equivalent to ‘the ball exited the box rolling’.

The familiar sign ‘se habla español’, which is reasonably translated as ‘Spanish is spoken here’, assumes that what matters is that Spanish is spoken, not who speaks it. Se is used when the agent is unknown, and also in speaking of involuntary physiological phenomena that are beyond the speaker’s control, such as ‘se me hace agua la boca’, ‘my mouth is watering’.

One day in a carpentry class he struck his bodged woodwork construction with his hammer once too often, and it broke. That’s what he told the teacher with a shrug: ‘Se rompió.’
This incensed the teacher—not the breakage, but the usage. ‘Se, se, se,’ he hissed. ‘Everything in this country is se, it broke, it just happened, why the hell don’t you say I broke it, I screwed up. Say it, say, Yo lo rompí

Bak notes that research tends to be positive about bilingualism in countries that are positive about it, such as Canada, and negative in countries that have an ambivalent attitude towards it, the United States in particular. The prevailing climate of opinion might influence the attitudes researchers bring to their studies, the answers they expect to find, they way they interpret their data,

In clinics, information is human and untidy. Clinicians have to accept real-world conditions. It is not possible to conduct the flawlessly designed experiments to which theoretically-minded psychologists aspire. The differences in their environments create a cultural difference between the two research communities. Ideally, the different perspectives brought to the field by researchers from different disciplines

Editors are more inclined to publish reports of positive results, and researchers may not bother to submit articles reporting negative ones. Scientists regretfully bury those in their files, producing a form of publication bias known as the ‘file drawer effect’. The lines of inquiry that didn’t work out form a kind of anti-curriculum vitae in scientists archives.

Translators have a patron saint, Jerome, who translated biblical texts into Latin; translator-traitors have an ideal candidate as a patron anti-saint in Malintzin, La Malinche, Doña Marina, the Nahuatl interpreter to, and mistress of, the Spanish conquistador Herńan Cortes. Many of her myth-makers have deemed her a traitor to the native people of Mexico

and the risk of food shortages is correspondingly high. People are likelier to have to call on outside help—and are more likely to get it if they speak the same language as those to whom they are calling. Nettle argues that language diversity is lower at higher latitudes because people need bonds of mutual support that reach beyond their immediate neighbourhoods

tropical climate is much the same in December and in July: hot and wet. Plants can persist all year round instead of dying in winter and returning in spring. The growing season for food plants is long, and so the risk of famine is low. Communities can be confident about being able to rely on their own resources. Such confidence diminishes with distance from the equator. At higher latitudes growing seasons are short

In other places and times, pronunciation is the diagnostic test. People are challenged to utter words that distinguish 'us' from 'them', friends from foes, often with fatal consequences. The prototype is the biblical story of how the men of Gilead smote their enemies and blocked their escape by seizing the passages of Jordan.

Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right

Leon Trotsky. By the end of the Second World War he had made his way to Chile, where he obtained Costa Rican documents. He acquired his Costa Rican diplomatic passport after befriending the country's president Jose Figueres. The former Soviet intelligence officer Boris Volodarsky speculates that Figueres may have believed he and Don Teodoro were distantly related. Grigulevich's feat of national infiltration

Josifas followed in 1934, taking with him orders from OGPU, the Soviet secret police, and the first of his many code names and aliases, ARTUR. In Argentina he learned Spanish, adding to a portfolio of tongues said to number up to ten. He used it in Spain during the Civil War, and later in Mexico, where he nearly succeeded in assassinating another of Stalin's betes noires, the former Bolshevik and Red Army commander

Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich was born Josifas Romualdovicius Grigulevicius in what is today the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, in 1913. His mother was Russian and his father was a member of Lithuania's small Karaite ethnic community; the townspeople mostly spoke Polish or Yiddish. As a young man he became a communist militant, spending a year in prison for subversive activities. His father emigrated to Argentina

English speakers are able to take their language for granted because of its prestige and power. They have the luxury of being able to regard relationships with non-native speakers as straightforward. Being inconsiderate to their interlocutors, by discounting the need to find an appropriate style of speech, is likely to work to their own advantage. Since the world has decided that English is to be its lingua franca

The historian Timothy Snyder notes how Lithuanians adopted Czech characters to 'make their language look less Polish'. Those characters had been designed by Czechs who wanted to make their own language look less German (and also to avoid the clutter of double consonants such as 'cz' - possibly because the Polish language's insatiable demand for the letter 'z' caused shortages throughout eastern Europe).

English speakers learning Russian will discover that when referring to a friend, they can’t simply call the person ‘my friend’, but have to choose from among several words—four, typically, give or take—that denote different degrees of closeness. They are obliged to testify about how warm their friendship is. Languages set different distances between people.

Really enjoying this book

Some mix of research observations and interpretations, but interesting stats on bilingual families and vocabulary development. Basically, speak the minority language at home.

Really enjoy this book so far