many Tims, favorite word, tower of Babel

[asakiyume]

many Tims
The other day I saw the two neighbor girls onto the bus as both parents had to leave the house very early. I went over at 7:15, and they were still in their bedroom playing an imaginary game together. They are nine and eleven years old (or maybe eight and eleven; not sure), and it was the most charming thing to hear them talking and dramatizing together so happily.

"There's many Tims; what do you expect?!" --that was the one line I wrote down from their game.

And they were so good about getting themselves organized and out the door on time. Their parents should be proud.

favorite word
The ninja girl tells me that one thing her students in Japan like to ask her is what her favorite Japanese word is. By this they don't actually mean just any old random-ass word; they're really meaning more like favorite concept, but they ask in terms of favorite word. She said she usually turns the question back to them and asks them what their favorites are, and it's interesting to hear what they say: they are concepts that are very approved of, admired, promoted, etc., like 一所懸命 (isshokenmei: all one's might/effort) or 思いやり (omoiyari: considerateness, attentiveness, thoughtfulness). You couldn't ask the question "what's your favorite word?" in English to get answers like this; you'd have to make it "What's your favorite virtue?" or something.

Tower of Babel
And that got me thinking how we can understand the story of the tower of Babel as a blessing that God gave people rather than a punishment. When everyone was working together on the tower of Babel--and incidentally, all speaking the same language--they were single minded. One language, one idea. But when the tower was broken and they all found themselves speaking different languages, suddenly they were multi-minded. Many languages, many ideas. Many ways of expressing how it is to be human. And, when we learn each other's languages in a world of many languages, we're expending effort to understand each other--not just "see through another's eyes" but "borrow another's tongue." If we all spoke the same language, we'd lack that diversity and that opportunity to make an effort to understand one another.

Comments

[amaebi]

It's so comforting to me to hear about your neighbors' improv story making games.

About Babel: I couldn't agree more if I had a dump truck. The number of times I've heard monolingual anglophone USians prove that this or that is The State of Nature in terms of US wording or grammar.

And I periodically remember how, when I was six, I got worried about how poems could be translated-- surely, I thought, a word for the same entity/action/concept wouldn't rhyme across all languages? (Obviously I had strong ideas of What Poems Were, too.)

[asakiyume]

Awww, but how perceptive you were to realize that a word likely *wouldn't* rhyme in another language! And I totally understand child-you's preoccupation. Something doesn't need to rhyme to be a poem, but in a poem that rhymes, the rhyme is very important, and what to do about it **is** a concern.

[amaebi]

I think I was a lot more monolingual than I was perceptive. At least I was other-language *aware*: I knew that my father only began to learn English when he started school, and I'm afraid I pestered him for Slovenian he could remember almost none of.

ETA: I wonder, though, why my wrong-grounds question doesn't apparently typically occur to my fellow-monolinguals.

ETA2: Thinking about my childhood and languages I now realize for the first time how much I hungered to learn at least one more language I was as quite young person in Southern Illinois. Huh.

[asakiyume]

Wow, you are just second generation! Very cool.

Re: your ETAs, people are just very, very different, right? There is a plenitude of things that preoccupy people or make people curious or that people enjoy, and other vast swathes they're not thinking about.

[amaebi]

Depends on how you count generations, yes: my father was born in the US, but his father was born in Slovenia.

True dat about different interests: I am, for example, notoriously car-blind: I can tell different cars' colors, but seldom keep track of models or even their display logos.