"to possess another language is to possess another soul"

mathilda, I imagine the author just made it up, as I have never seen it before. However, whoever the author is should be congratulated. I have never read a more wonderful (and true!) statement about languages. What a shame that TT no longer allows signatures!

he said "a french proverb goes..." but when googling almost any combination of above words in french you get 0 useful come outs.

personnally, i thought it was cheap, not brilliant.

"personnally, i thought it was cheap, not brilliant."

¿por qué? mathilda.

There's something almost identical in Turkish: "bir lisan, bir insan" = "one language, one person" ("for every language, another person" is a nicer interpretation).

It reminds me a little of an Irish (Gaelic) saying "tír gan teanga, tír gan anam" - "a country without a language is a country without a soul". Of course it's not the same thing, as it's talking about the effect of losing a language on a whole people, rather than the effect of having an extra language on an individual. But it shares the idea of the relationship between a language and a soul.

Although that phrase is often described as an "Irish proverb", I don't know if it's a genuine proverb that's been around for years, or something that was invented by the language revival movement in the early 20th century. I do know that I heard it repeated at tedious length by the teachers of my youth and never liked it.

A bit of Googling of the phrase Mathilda asked about shows is widely attributed to both Charlemagne and Emperor Charles V - a difference of a whole eight centuries! Maybe people associate it with Charles V because he's also known for the quotation about speaking something to his horse and something else to his wife or whatever it was - I guess he must have had a lot of souls.

For me both phrases seem rather trite, and probably too meaningless to be described as either true or false.

For shame, you who find it trite or cheap! Truly, nearly all of a culture (its soul) is embedded in its language. Once a person learns that language—not just the phrasebook version for travelers—that person also absorbs something of the culture not otherwise found—its soul—and impossible to find in any other way.

If you truly do not believe this, I feel sorry for you. I know that when speaking Spanish—my adopted tongue—I have quite a different world-view than when speaking English—my native tongue. If this isn't "possessing another soul", I don't know what it is! The same was true when I learned German as a youth. When speaking German, I actually saw things differently.

I guess "linguists" like mathilda have a more jaded outlook and find different languages just a way to converse with strangers. Those with that attitude just don't know what they're missing!!!!

mazgringo it is from a film and it sounded exactly like one of those pseudo- deep catchphrases which always pop up in movies and are meant for people to go "ooh that's so deep" (like, "this is not just popcorn time waste...")

also, there's cultural differences between you and me. you might be american (i can't look at your profile this morning for some reason), with a culture that is a lot more prone to fluffy lovey dovey discourse that uses words such as"soul" whose mere occurence make a european cringe.

Edited by: mathilda to add a little thingy

whose mere occurence make a european cringe.

except in outright cynical or otherwise bittered down contexts (for example when nabokov put the word "soul" in the mouth of a pedophile, it sounded just right /[sorry for making anyone gag now;) /])

Edited by: mathilda

i didn'T mean to cross that out i just don't know how to post innocent square brackets, not a link, or what i just got, and so i give up.