Transient recently read an interesting article by Mario Wandruszka (1911-2004), who was a professor at the University of Salzburg, entitled "L'uomo multilingual" [1 ] , and although some things he says seem obvious, perhaps not be so. Why transcribe sees fit, translated, some paragraphs of text. About
use language, languages, as a working tool, we are generally aware of what it means to customize the language, the "contagion" that identify a person, a small group or a writer. At the same time, we fear the terrible traps of so-called "false friends", to which Professor Wandruszka refers to the end point chosen.
Without further ado, here are some of the considerations of this prestigious Austrian civil law.
Language, this very human faculty we have to express in words our desires, feelings, thoughts, our will, the world around us and what we have internalized that we do not acquire language once and for all in the first childhood as a unique language, homogeneous and definite. Spoken language, ie the cultural varieties used by our mother and other relatives, so Grandma reads to the child or the child, television, more and more invasive, local variants and social learning from kindergarten, are only routing to a multilingualism that increasingly characterize written language you learn in school, literary and poetic language, national language, state, bureaucracy, politics, journalism, all the languages \u200b\u200bof modern science sector and the most advanced technologies, with their jargons and slangs , all talk of everyday life in perpetual motion.
Cyanotype-spiral, Jonathan A Lewis. (© 2008)
In this regard, and to varying degrees, we are all multilingual and within the scope of our mother tongue. This multilingualism fundamental whether individual as if it is collective, from the beginning has three characteristics that many linguists-be-forgotten Chomskyans Saussurian or even despise its skeletal outline.
- The understanding of speech than usual, thoroughly and in a thousand ways, both our faculty of reproduction and production. Each of us only able to play or produce a tiny fraction of all the sounds and words, of all shapes and figures of speech we mean when we hear or read.
- Obviously, our multilingualism is imperfect, necessarily incomplete. Imperfection is a constitutive element of human language itself, the assumption of any creative process of any development, change, renewal, enrichment of languages, which have much to do loans from one to another language.
- The ability to learn and use (always imperfectly) different languages \u200b\u200balways drives us to produce, make noise or interpretations and, therefore, cause countless hybrids (which in German is called Sprachmischungen ), a universal phenomenon already referred to a hundred years ago Hugo Schuchardt and Hermann Paul. [2]
Uriel Weinreich [3] with his work Languages \u200b\u200bin Contact (1953), we are accustomed to speak of "contact languages," a concept to consider rather clumsy because, really, does not say what it is: the billiard balls also come into contact. It is not just contact, in fact it is spread, collusion between languages: it is their interaction and interpretation. This has led, among other things, in all European languages, the common denominator massive Greco-Roman origin, thousands of words, prefixes, suffixes, phrases and expressions, metaphors that recognize the common heritage from one language to another using the phonetic and morphological changes that wins each. It is a genuine European linguistic community that expands and intensifies every day with the very recent scientific and technological terminology. We need only open any newspaper writing in one of our languages \u200b\u200band a red pencil to underline all the "European" Greco-Latin we find on one page to realize the critical importance by quantity and quality of this community European language, effective and increasingly active. [...]
The result of all this is that our languages \u200b\u200bare increasingly resemble. This same phenomenon of linguistic convergence is observed anywhere in Europe that some are quick to call "post."
is, unfortunately, a convergence not only imperfect, but also whimsical and paradoxical, because next to many European terms identical meaning in different languages, real friends of all confidence-pan, we find the abominable " false friends ", produced by many ups and downs and historical contingencies. What in German we say die Signature, no signature is printed on paper, but the company; der Statist is not the man of State (which in German would der Staats-mann ), but the helper (in a play, or an extra in a movie.) The English word l argo in Italian means' wide ', and the Italian verb out accounts for Castilian' up ', a successo, in Italian, is equivalent to our' success', and great In English, Castilian has no meaning of 'cool', but of 'jovial', 'happy', 'friendly'. The same happens between the Scandinavian and Slavic languages.
Our languages \u200b\u200bdo not respond to logical-mathematical system devised by some peculiar Europeans and Americans. False friends, on the one hand, and semantic overlaps the other, so common in our language (ie a European term, international, along with a word "indigenous" - by it were - roughly equivalent, although it has a slightly different stylistic value), show otherwise.
There you go, then, warily. If an Italian tells you that there donkey in food, to know that it is butter, if one speaks French voler , refers to theft, not the flight, if you propose a Swedish kaka or dessert with tea, you know that offers you a piece of cake, for a Portuguese one nose a hill, and in Czech hours means 'mountain' ...
The "false friends", as he said the passer at the beginning and explains very well the teacher Wandruszka are traps, traps that can easily fall and foster misunderstandings, sometimes funny, but sometimes unpleasant. And needless to say we are one of the nightmares of the translators. The press, with the supposed guise of "emergency" does a disservice to the quality of language, in which the "false friends" - especially from Anglo - is slip with the ease of air through a window not closed.
[1] Mario Wandruszka: "L'uomo multilingual" in Aspetti metodologici e nello studio of Multilingualism teorici nei territori dell'Alpe-Adria. Atti of the Convegno Internazionale, Udine, 12-14 ottobre 1989 . Testi di raccolti to cure Moñai Liliana Spinozzi. Tricesimo (Udine), Aviani Editore & Consorzio per la Costituzione e sviluppo degli Insegnamenti what universitari, 1990, pp. 11-20.
[2] Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927) was an Austrian comparative linguist who specialized in Romance languages \u200b\u200band Creole, and was also interested in the Basque language (one of his works is entitled, precisely, Primitiae Lingvae Vasconum , 1923). Hermann Paul (1846-1921) was a linguist and lexicographer German among his works are Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte ('Principles of the history of language', 1880) and the German translation of the Finnish epic Kalevala (1885), carried out during a long stay in Helsinki.
[3] Uriel Weinreich (1926-1967), a linguist, an American Jew born in Vilnius (now capital of Lithuania), which specialized in the language of their ancestors asquenazís yiddish, established in the book cited the concept of interlanguage.
With thanks to Professor Pietro U. Dini, who provided the passer
text Mario Wandruszka. Do
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