Transcript of “Are There Languages That Aren’t Very Idiomatic?”
Hi there, you have A Way with Words.
Hi there, this is Joey. I’m calling from Orono, Minnesota.
So I just graduated from the University of Arizona, and one of my majors was Italian Studies. Part of that was learning the language, and I was able to get a good understanding of the language, especially when I spent a semester in Italy.
But what I realized in learning another language is how much of it really relies on kind of the history of the country. And it’s not exactly just the words themselves, which is pretty complex. And I feel like it would be quite difficult to really thoroughly learn any second language because of how much history there is behind a language.
So my question is if there is a language that really doesn’t have that kind of context where it’s simple to learn in a classroom setting and you can really take command of the language just based on the words themselves.
So you’re looking for a language that doesn’t have a lot of idiomatic or colloquial or proverbial kind of layers to it?
Exactly, yes. I suppose, you know, one of the finest examples I had was in an essay that I was writing in Italian. I wrote the phrase eye to eye, and my professor has no idea what I was trying to say.
And conversely, I was meeting my uncle for dinner, and he speaks English as his native language. I was emailing him in Italian, and the way you say I can’t wait translates in English directly to I can’t see the time.
Yeah, I ran into that with Spanish, no veo las horas. I don’t see the hours until I can see you.
That’s lovely.
Yeah, it’s the same idea.
I do love it. Yeah. So I think Martha and you both have really tipped off with that. I don’t see the hours. I don’t see the time. There is a perspective here that I want to encourage, which is finding a willingness to embrace this idiomaticity, this colloquialism, without being uncomfortable with it and not feeling like you have to master it 100%.
You don’t even know English 100%, even though you might feel like you do. It is impossible, impossible to know 100% of a language. Just accept that there is always going to be a level of colloquialism that just escapes you. And that is part of the joy of language, is the sense of discovery.
That said, all that aside, just push that away. To answer your real question, there are languages that you could learn that have a lot less colloquialisms and idioms and proverbs. And they are invented languages like Esperanto.
And now Esperanto is a language that was invented to try to be that universal language that people could go anywhere in the world and not have a lot of those cultural trappings that bring the biases and the histories that kind of make it, you think, oh, that’s their language. I don’t want to speak their language because they did this a thousand years ago to my people.
But Esperanto does have some idioms, but they tend mostly to either be borrowed from the world’s languages and translated word for word. There’s one, I think, about roses with thorns. There is no rose without thorns. Or they tend to be idioms about the language itself, you know, about the people who invented the language.
So that’s one thing to consider. There are a huge number of Esperantists, people who have conferences and they write books and they enjoy meeting each other around the world. And Esperanto, because it is heavily drawn from European languages, is actually not a bad language to learn in terms of using it to branch off into other Latin-based languages.
And speaking of that, classical Latin, because you enjoy Italian, Latin might feel very familiar to you. And it has kind of an objective grammatical system. And there’s a clarity in Latin that many find very elegant.
Now, it does have sayings and idioms and stuff, but the way that it’s structured strikes many as nearly ideal. Now, I think it’s often overblown and overstated, but you might find something there that you’re just not getting with Italian.
And you also have to remember that Italian is in some ways almost a constructive language because it is so heavily fed by all these regional dialects of languages that aren’t quite Italian and themselves were derived independently from Latin. The boot of Italy is filled with these regional languages that have never fully been subsumed by any other language and have existed on their own for many centuries, if not thousands of years.
So that’s kind of one of the issues with Italian. It’s constantly peppered with all these other dialects and all their different diversions and distractions. Those are the suggestions that I would make off the top of my head.
Is Esperanto a contemporary language?
I think it’s more than 100 years old, actually. There’s long been these movements to try to come up with a language that, as a way of unifying the world’s people, we could speak when we’re together and kind of recreate this idea of one people, one language. It’s never really worked.
And Esperanto isn’t a language that people tend to teach to children, so it’s not in that way a living language. That said, it’s always had its advocate since the very beginning. And there are conferences and books, and people who speak it and teach it to themselves and teach others tend to be very passionate about it.
So it’s got a wonderful, energetic community of speakers who welcome new learners to it. So it might be worth working into if you want to find a new community of passionate language learners.
I would love to hear from Esperantis. And also, I have to wonder if getting together at a conference, you don’t develop the language a little bit, you know?
Yeah.
A little idiom here and there, a little shared joke, a little slang. I’m very curious to hear from people as to whether they have that experience with Esperanto.
So there we go.
Oh, no kidding. That’s our best advice. I’m sure our listeners will jump in with their own ideas. But, Joey, that’s what we’ve got for you.
Well, that’s wonderful. I really appreciate you taking the question, and it sounds like I have quite a lot of reading to do now.
Always. We’re all like that, aren’t we? Every day is a new book.
Oh, definitely.
All right. Take care of yourself now.
