A Quote by Anne Carson
The Greek language seems different than other languages. I'm not the only person to think this. Usually, I come up with some kind of dopey metaphor for why it's different. But it seems, somehow, more original, more like being in the morning of language.
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I think it's about the feeling more than a language. And I think that we and every culture in the world has to keep their own language just to bring something else, something different, and show a different vision of the world, actually. And that's why I'm trying to keep my language.
Language is decanted and shared. If only one person is left alive speaking a language - the case with some American Indian languages - the language is dead. Language takes two and their multiples.
If you go back a century in Europe, all over the place people were speaking different languages. There were dozens of languages in France and Italy, and they're all called French [and Italian], but they were not mutually comprehensible. They were different languages. And they have mostly disappeared in the last century or so. Some are being preserved, like Welsh, some are being revived, like Basque or Catelan to some extent. There are plenty of people in Europe who can't talk to their grandmother because they talk a different language.
In Europe there's kind of a reaction to the European Union, kind of a move towards some kind of regionalization. It's more advanced in some regions than others, like in Spain for example. Catelan was repressed under Franco. People spoke it, but not publicly. It's now the language of Catelonia. The Basque language is being revived, not just the language but the culture, the folk music and everything else. So you're getting more diverse societies, and it's happening in Britain as well.
Music is language itself. It should not have any barriers of caste, creed, language or anything. Music is one, only cultures are different. Music is the language of languages. It is the ultimate mother of languages.
It seems likely that Jesus, being a scholarly young man, learned some Hebrew, but that's conjecture. It's more likely that Jesus spoke some Greek, as this language dominated the region after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century.
And there are also languages that divide nouns into much more specific genders. The African language Supyire from Mali has five genders: humans, big things, small things, collectives, and liquids. Bantu languages such as Swahili have up to ten genders, and the Australian language Ngan’gityemerri is said to have fifteen different genders, which include, among others, masculine human, feminine human, canines, non-canine animals, vegetables, drinks, and two different genders for spears (depending on size and material).
I work in Hebrew. Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages. Not now, for the last three thousand years, Hebrew has been penetrated and fertilized by ancient Semitic languages - by Aramaic, by Greek, by Latin, by Arabic, by Yiddish, by Latino, by German, by Russian, by English, I could go on and on. It's very much like English. The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages. Every language has influences and is an influence.
Politics is different than movies. Politics are controlled by leaders. Leaders of every country have different interests. And they try to explain to their people why they should take one side or the other side. But in the movie its doing the opposite. It allows you to have a Universal Experience. You don't watch it as politics but as a movie. You don't have different reactions all over. It's so universal a language. It's not a political language serving a political agenda. The language of cinema is a world language. With the Hollywood movie, it brings about the same reaction wherever it goes.
Scientists in different disciplines don't speak the same language. They publish in different journals. It's like the United Nations: You come together, but no one speaks the same language, so you need some translators.
I love playing with language and the rhythm of language - for some reason, this seems so much easier for me to do when I get to make things up than when writing nonfiction.
The hardest thing is being with other people — it's like they're on a different wavelength, but only you know it. They talk about their lives and what's wrong with them, and you kind of, like, just let them go. It's a whole different language, and you've got to remember that you can only respond in their mother tongue. It's really hard to relate.
I always find that I'm less sarcastic in France and maybe I'm a bit more shy and a bit more reserved, even more polite. My voice tends to go up quite a lot. I'd love to speak more languages just to discover who I become in a different language.
One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
The Language of the Dream/Night is contrary to that of Waking/Day. It is a language of Images and Sensations, the various dialects of which are far less different from each other, than the various Day-Languages of Nations.
I am not very good with languages. So, in spite of working in films in 17 different languages, I only follow my passion to act without getting worked up about the language.
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