Schleiermacher and Deutscher

Schleiermacher writes, “whoever makes the sacrifice of writing in another language for the sake of scientific inquiry will be able to write freely and without constraint, rather than secretly translating as he goes along, only when he can lose himself in his subject matter.” I don’t particularly understand this statement but from what I think he’s saying—that it’s much easier to write in another language than to translate—I find it quite true. When I wrote letters to my grandparents as a kid, I thought and wrote in Chinese instead of thinking of what I want to say in English, then writing the translated version of that on paper. Similarly for homework from previous Japanese classes, it’s much easier to write directly in Japanese than to write something in English and attempting to translate from that because it tends to mess up the thought process and make grammar much more difficult than it needs to be.

Gendered objects were one of the hardest parts of learning French in high school and is one of the things that make French very different from English. However, I don’t think English is exactly without this gender system either—e.g., in English people often assign the pronoun “she” to boats and to countries/land—but it’s definitely not as prevalent as in French or other languages nor so obvious. I find it so interesting how depending on the language, the speakers will imagine different gendered voices for certain objects. It feels like it may limit their perception and the possibilities. But at the same time, it allows chances for meaningful messages via voice vs object (e.g., giving a lamp—a feminine object—a masculine voice) that may be lost if the language was in English.

A somewhat long time ago my brother said that people’s personality changes depending on the language they speak. He mentioned that I was much quieter when speaking in Mandarin compared to English. I noticed it too, but I attributed it to being more comfortable speaking in English due to reading English books all the time and school and being less confident in speaking Mandarin because I only talked to my parents in Mandarin and there wasn't much opportunity to learn more vocab compared to the ones used daily. At that time my brother knew English, Mandarin Chinese, French (proficiency in that order) and was learning Russian. He demonstrated himself saying things in each language and he did sound different—whether from a personality difference or just from the sound of the language itself though, I couldn’t tell. I thought it was an interesting statement.

 -Lesley