Borges ones
wrote a poem "On beginning of a studying Ancient English" and when
they asked him why he had chosen such a strange topic for poetry he answered
that studying of English is such a moving emotional experience for him as
watching a sunrise for example. The beginning of a studying English that was in
a 5th grade wasn't particularly moving (I don't think that there's any element
of our educational system that apt to be compared with the sunrise) but now,
when I at long last came to the average level of understanding the language I
knew what he had meant. With my current level of English I need to check a
dictionary no more than two times per page while reading simple fiction (and
with a dictionary built in an ebook it almost don't make a stumble) so now I
can at first time experience works written in English in such flow manner as I
experience Russian ones.
And except
that now I begin to experience first fragments of English language thinking,
dreams in English etc - the birth of English mind\language which despite of its
scantiness is in some ways more effective then my Russian one.
Now you can
easily tell that I'm very in all that Sapir-Whorf's "language you use
changes the way you think" thing. I truly believe it is. Once I've learned
toki-pona (that's pocket - just 130 words - artificial language created by
Canadian linguist Sonya Ellen Kissa) to check is it true. Toki-pona is very
easy, you can learn it completely in a week. Now I've forgotten it 'cause I
have nobody to talk too. But when I've learned it I used to try to think with
it for sometime and I felt that the way I thought have being changing. And the
funniest thing is that some of that changes were retained even after I forgot
toki-pona completely.
So what's
the difference? Russian is very specific in that sense that we have a slightly
different word for everything (in "he did", "she did" and
"they did" we have 3 different words for "did"). Because of
that first: it's probably very hard to learn Russian if it's not your native
language, and second: grammar of sentence is pretty loose so if you found right
forms of words, you can put them in almost any order and sentence would be
grammatically correct (ok, there are a lot of people here who make incorrect
sentences, but you probably need a special talent to do that). Russian has only
3 tenses (not 16 as in English) and no changes in sequence of tenses. We don't
have modal verbs (came in, came at, come by and come down - completely
different words) so size of personal vocabulary is probably more crucial then
in English. That's why something sounds a bit too flowery in English would
probably sound just good in Russian. And opposite: it's hard to pass with
Russian such feeling of "beauty of simplicity" that English language
(as I think) so good at. In Russian it would probably sound a bit
simple-minded.
Couple of
months ago I found a game that asks you to model neuron network of a ladybug
brain (http://www.biologic.com.au/bugbrain/) and I spent some time with this
game. In one mission I got to create a brain that allow a bug to stop when
branch is over, turn when there's other branch, stand still while the bird is
near and couple of other things. It took me about 8-9 neurons to build such
brain. Then I came online to look the solution and found out that guy needed
only 2 neurons for this task. That was because he very carefully calculated
thresholds of every input and I used only 1 and 0.5 values. And that
"simplicity because of precision" is what (as I feel) distinguishes
English from Russian.
One of the
problems with the way I write is that I use language intuition that was
developed in Russian surrounding to write in English. That causes my sentences
to be too long and wordy. Other is settled constructions. With your native language
you don't need to put an effort to build a sentence of some kind, you just know
how to do it right. But when you apply that "knowledge" to other
language it always ends up with calquing constructions from your native language
onto other. (For example at first I've written "speak in English"
'cause that's how we say it in Russian but I've spotted that mistake and
corrected it (and that makes me wonder how much of such mistakes I haven't
spotted). And for deciding is it correct to write "into other language"
or "onto other language" I've got to flip a coin (here I wrote
"drop a coin" at first:) )
