Wednesday, March 15, 2006

The couple I met last night did not speak each other's language. One spoke Slovak. The other, Czech. Yet they still could communicate. There is something romantic and metaphorical about this, and I would hate it to be ruined by someone explaining the differences between the two languages were trivial. Let me keep in my understanding of this world, two human beings share their existences and communicate their humanity in their own language and are still understood by each other. It gives me hope that all those thoughts I fumble out with my own words may be comprehensible to someone else despite the rough hew of our English words and grammar.

1 comment:

  1. One of the most amazing things in the world, I think, is our ability to communicate with one another. We tend not to think about this when we're with other people that share our language. But, having moved across the world and lived with a family that spoke almost none of my language and I almost none of theirs, we still managed to become quite close. Come to think of it, perhaps it's language that gets in the way of real communication.

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