THE BRIDGE — The important thing about languages

Henri Rivière — 1888–1902 — Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower

Theoretically speaking (I know I said this is not an academic space; bear with me), language is alive. Like an animal, it evolves. This is important because there is no real control over it, and this is our starting point.

We are not here trying to find the purest form of whatever language because this is a doomed journey before it even starts. We are here elaborating what is true in the way that these tools change us and how we change them.

Language is a tool; this is the 30th time I’ve said this in two posts, and whenever I’m insistent, it means it’s important. I’m not trying to just annoy people with my verbosity crisis. This tool allows us to build communicative bridges. So let’s dive into an analogy I have absolutely loved to build over the past… 10 years:

When you speak, you speak from a very specific ‘linguistic realm’, where you attach weight to the words in an undeniably subjective manner, considering how you first heard that word, how you kept hearing it and using it throughout your life, as the latter was shaped through your very individual experiences. Even in collectiveness, and as much as we can share feelings, the way we understand any kind of interaction with reality is unbelievably particular to how we perceive it alone.

This comes out in the way we shape words inside of a pre-existing structure: the lexical choices, the way we arrange the words in a sentence, the prepositions we choose to use to express the relationship between two parts of the sentence, where we hesitate and where we pause in a sentence, what we choose to omit, the twists we give to the ‘norm’ to make people laugh or gasp, everything. This is you, standing on one block of language wood with your huge feelings and ideas sitting inside of your “linguistic bag”, which is where you take stuff from to build the next block when the itch for connection inevitably consumes you.

This is where things get tricky. Because we are social animals with the power of language who have been historically conditioned to avoid curiosity, we took this beautiful tool and undressed it of its nuance. So whenever we run to another language-powered animal, we completely disregard the fact that the other person is also speaking and understanding our words from their own linguistic bag, standing on top of their very own wooden language block, their own ‘linguistic realm’. You see now that to actually build this bridge, it takes intention, awareness, and a teeny tiny bit of insanity to jump into the world of meanings — plural — just to face the fact that my meaning can be the absolute truth to me, while yours is the absolute truth to you, and still they might be the total opposite?

So, in my disturbed but incredibly passionate brain, the image I was able to build to symbolize the ideal, if not perfect, dialogue was the construction of this bridge, coming from two different people starting from opposite sides and doing whatever they can to reach each other halfway by adding new pieces of wood, taken from their own bags, until they meet in the middle and can finally get a glimpse of their interlocutor’s bag.

That’s when this inter-understanding begins, and yes, somebody always has to go first. That’s another tricky part that, in my humble opinion, academics just throw out the window: learning languages and about languages requires us to deep-dive into our vulnerability. Language traverses every single emotion we have, shaping them. So here’s the kick: to understand language, we have to be open to reopening and digging into our own blissful wounds.

As a language teacher based in Brazil, this became translucent to me over my 17 years of teaching English, 10 of teaching French, and a lifetime as a learner of the symbol of language: people struggle learning languages not because they are incapable of comprehending the symbols, they fail time and time again because the majority of people teaching them have no idea that to be a teacher, knowing what you teach is simply a pre-requisit. The real job of any teacher is mastering the skill of translating what is obvious to us, considering our pupils’ way of reading the world, elevating their linguistic bag to the highest peak of honor, and talking to them from there.

People have historically come to me for my services as a teacher in moments of great despair: “If I don’t get this promotion, my life will crumble”, “I need to pass this proficiency test so I can follow my dream, but I am frightened by grammar”, “I am literally traumatized by English, but it is the only way of opening this door of opportunity that might very possibly never show up again”.

Can you imagine the kind of pressure these people are under? Now imagine the person “helping” them to fix this is a dude who spent 4 months in Australia and now feels ready to teach as a side job with no real commitment to their students’ experiences. Frightening. The person who should help you build your part of the bridge doesn’t even know that the bridge is there and, on top of that, will scare you for life when, after a few years, you see “past participle” written in some random place, and you’re still shivering at the sight because:

1. you still don’t understand what it means, and

2. you think it’s your own fault you don’t.

3. 
   

This anecdotal part of the text should be enough to bring you any kind of memory that affirms what you just read. At one point, mastering one specific language or one specific way of communicating was the key to the direction of the unfolding of your life. My philosophical beef with most people lies in one simple but very uncomfortable question: why are we still trying to deny that when we ignore the nuances and the complexity of communication, shit falls apart?

Exactly because this is a non-academic space to explore this kind of question, I will leave here a few theoretical truths about language, and you can choose to scratch that itch more deeply and scientifically through Google if you really want to (look up French Discourse Analysis and Linguistic Structuralism, if you are ready to go down this rabbit hole):

• Languages organically change over time;

• There is no such thing as objectivity in language;

• We shape the world through language, and language shapes us through the way we see the world;

• Everything is a symbol; the word is the mask to the thing, not the thing itself (if you wanna read about this, go to Saussure, not Lacan; that guy’s symbols are just all over the place, bless his heart);

• THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OBJECTIVITY IN LANGUAGE.

Now that we are all, hopefully, on the same page, we can begin to understand and discuss how, from the construction of those multiple bridges, language affects us.

The Tower is about to fall down; you are safe to keep looking up.