Language says so much...

In Europe we love to put our neighbors into little boxes. We enjoy compartmentalizing and analyzing and stereotyping and labeling. The english are pasty and disheveled, the germans are stiff and overbearing, the dutch are stingy relativists, the swedes are naked, the italians are sex fiends, the french are aloof and pretentious, the irish aren't sober... the lists go on and on. And spain? Well, in spain we are proud and arrogant apparently. However, I am starting to believe that there is something to the claim the more I study language.
You can learn a lot from a language: The way gender and society have interact, the way social trends and economic values have shaped expression, but most of all you really get a feeling for the values and attitudes of a culture through its language. I saw that once again today as I tried to teach my students the meaning of the word Humility and its derivatives. Now, in spanish we have the word Humildad (which means Humility) and the word Humillación (which means humiliation). So far the two languages match up. However, once you try to explain the word Humbling or the verb To Humble one runs into a problem. In spanish, to be humiliated and to be humbled are the same word (humillar) and so are the adjectives humiliating and humbling (humillante). So for a spaniard, to be humbled is intrinsically a humiliating experience. If the acquisition of humility is an embarrassment to a whole culture, I think it is fair to say that the stereotype is true.

Comments

Anonymous said…
...that's why when some Christian songs are translated into Spanish they sound worse when it comes to sing "humillar"... I always thought God didn't want to "humillarnos", but never thought of the translation stuff to come to that expression.
10/3/07 07:47
Jenn said…
Wow, I had never thought of that. Language is very telling. Usually you get the typical, "there are 18 words for snow in the esikimo language" and stuff like that, but this has much larger ramifications.
14/3/07 17:46
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