Re: language maintenance

From: Martin Owen (mowen@rem.bangor.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Jan 27 2000 - 12:33:29 PST


Genevive writes:
>It was
>quite striking to me that my Mexican friends never
>said a sentence that didn't have word plays, double
>entendres, wicked little undercurrents, and my
>Mexican-American ones seemed to keep their
>communications down to the bare bones. Did the
>transfer from Spanish to English somehow strip
>away the layers?

Those who translate poetry from one language to another have a particular
kind of genius. To take the cadences, rhythms and humour or pathos from
one set of word contrcutions to another really are quite special. I find
it hard to read poetry in foreign tongues and when learning a new language
I always find it hardest to find the spaces between words. Telling jokes
in a foreign tongue must be difficult.

It is possible to hear the authentic cadences and voice or genre in the
speakers of the colonial language. Dylan Thomas and Manley Hopkins wrote
with a Welsh intonation, Derek Walcott is clearly from the West Indes,
Wole Soyinka cleary Nigerian... not just because of thier subject matter,
but for the colouration of what they say.

Taking away the language dimension is clearly important. However the
languages are as they are because of the socio cultural patterns that
produce and reproduce their use. Whilst we must expect those patterns to
change, there is a legacy of some form of the same cultural reproduction,
whether the language is reproduced in a subsequent genreation or not.

If you are experiencing a culture of silence in Mexican Americans, there
are clearly other forces at work.



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