The Language Wall

Alaina Miller, Kristina Loescher, Kilah Wenzel, Rachel Lee, Jamie Cooper

           

            It is very interesting to dwell on words, colors, shapes and language.  To think about what words mean in a variety of contexts, what shapes match certain words, and where languages come from, can lead to deep discussion.  Through these experiments, thinking about this data can strengthen understanding of how the mind works.

Alphabet Origin

            Believe it or not, the set of characters displayed before your eyes, the so-called Roman alphabet, was the result of nearly 4000 years of transformation.  While one can claim that it was ultimately the cuneiform script which in one way or another caused the appearance of writing systems around the Mediterranean, in the Middle East and in India, others have chosen a particular script, the Proto-Sinaitic, as the first recognizable form of the alphabet.  The English 26 character letter system is most defined as a branch of the Roman and Greek alphabets, but before the Romans and the Greeks many other languages were formed (Encyclopedia Britannica). 

            The modern day alphabet finds origin with the Proto-Sinaitic language.  About 3700 years ago, West Semitic-speaking people of the Sinai became workers or slaves under Egyptian rule. The Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols the Semitic speakers saw made an impression on them, encouraging them to adapt these hieroglyphics into their own language.  Because phonetic Egyptian hieroglyphs only recorded the consonants, and not the vowels, the Sinaitic script also adopted this convention. On the other hand, unlike hieroglyphs which had multi-consonant signs, the Sinaitic script only used single consonants letters.  The result of this combination turned into the Proto-Sinatic language. This Proto-Sinaitic language soon spread to Canaan, and then it eventually evolved into the local Phoenician script (Victorian Fortune City).

            The Phoenician script is an important “trunk” in the alphabet tree.  Because of its importance, many modern scripts can be traced through it, ones such as:  Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek (Ancient Scripts).   

            Phoenician is a direct descendent of the Proto-Sinaitic script. Like Proto-Sinaitic, Phoenician is a “consonantal alphabet”, in which it only contains letters representing consonants. Vowels are generally omitted in this phase of the writing system.  The major change between Proto-Sinaitic and Phoenician is graphical. The Phoenician letter shapes grew to be more abstract and linear, in comparison to the more "pictographic" shape of Proto-Sinaitic signs (Ancient Scripts).

            Soon the Greeks adapted the Phoenician form of writing, leading them to be the first Europeans to learn to write with an alphabet.  Their new found knowledge sprung growth to writing systems all across Europe, eventually leading to all modern European alphabets (Ancient Scripts).

            From the shape of the letters, it is clear that the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, during the late 9^th century B.C. In fact, the Greek historian Herodotus (5th century B.C.) called the Greek letters "phoinikeia grammata" (φοινικήια γράμματα), which means Phoenician letters (Victorian Fortune City).  Unlike Greek, the Phoenician alphabet only had letters for consonants. When the Greeks adopted the alphabet, they found letters representing sounds not found in Greek. Instead of throwing them away, they
modified the extraneous letters to represent vowels. For example, the Phoenician letter 'aleph (which stood for a glottal stop) became the Greek letter alpha (which stands for the [a] sound). The word alpha in Greek does not mean anything at all, but in the original West Semitic form 'aleph, carried the meaning of “ox”. In fact, it is not too hard to invert the letter A and imagine it as the head of an ox (Ancient Scripts).     

            There were many variants of the early Greek alphabet, each changing to involve different dialects.  Eventually the Ionian alphabet was adopted in all Greek-speaking states, but before that happened, the Euboean variant, the Greek alphabet, was carried to the Italic peninsula and was adopted by Etruscan and then eventually the Romans (Ancient Scripts). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This figure displays an example of the connection from early Proto-Sinaitic written language to Greek.

           From this Grecian alphabet came the introduction to the Latin written alphabet.    Rome was a little quiet town on the shores of the Tiber River when her Latin-speaking citizens learned their writing from the Etruscans. A few hundred years later, the Romans brought their alphabet wherever they went.  Because of the prestige of the Roman culture, many non-Roman “barbarian” nations, embraced Latin for court use, and then they adopted the Latin alphabet for their own written language. Consequently, Western European nations all wrote using the Latin alphabet, and with European imperialism, which occurred in the last 500 years, the Latin alphabet (with local modifications) is probably the most omnipresent writing system in the world (Encyclopedia Britannica).

            Even though the Latin alphabet is essentially what Americans write with today, the original version was quite different. As Latium (the region where Latin is spoken and Rome is located) and Etruria (the region where Etruscan is spoken) are adjacent to each other, the very first examples of the Latin alphabet resemble the Etruscan alphabet. Nearly all the letters were adopted with the same phonetic values and graphical shapes. Also, the direction of writing either right-to-left, boustrophedon (the writing of alternate lines in opposite directions), or even left-to-right followed the Grecian Etruscan written language.  However, the Latinos did modify the Etruscan alphabet to form to their own (Ancient Scripts).  They threw away the signs , , , and  because Latin didn't have those sounds (Victorian Fortune City).  Latin also had sounds that were not present in the Etruscan dialect, so they invented their own.  In one instance, they invented the letter G by adding a vertical stroke to the letter C.  Slowly the Latin alphabet became increasingly standardized. Writing direction settled on left-to-right toward the 5th or 4th century B.C., and letter shapes became more or less the same in Latium. By Rome's Republican period (3rd century B.C.), the Latin alphabet evolved into the "modern" form of the alphabet (Ancient Scripts).

 

            The letters Y and Z were added to the Latium alphabet in order to adapt to Grecian rule during the early Imperial period (1st century B.C.). With these two additions, the Latin alphabet during those times, was nearly identical to most Western European alphabets. The alphabet remained unchanged until the middle ages, when new letters were created by slightly modifying existing letters.  These were the letters J, U, and W.  With these letters, our modern Roman alphabet was complete (Ancient Scripts).

           

Different Languages

Animal Speech

            Why do cows go 'muuu' in Spanish, but 'moo' in English? Why do French cows say 'meuh'? Part of the reason is that each language has a different system of sounds. The human mouth can make many sounds, but each language uses only some of them. French does have a sound like 'oo', but it's a short sound. It would be spelled 'mou' in French. To a French speaker, 'meuh' sounds more like the sound of a cow.

The sounds are at times characteristics of the language they are from.  For example, the sound a dog makes to a French person (“oh wah”) sounds more like French than English.

            Each language is made up of sounds and sound sequences that are characterisic of that language.  This extends into non-language sounds as well.

            Languages have different sounds, and they also have different ways of spelling their sounds.  Infants quickly learn the sounds of their language, but it takes a long time to learn how to write and how to spell.

            Learning to write means learning how sounds are related to symbols in your language. If you think about it, this is a strange thing to do. You take something that uses your mouth and your ears, and you turn it into something that uses your Poems

            Translations are rarely a simple one-to-one matching of words from one language to another.  The meaning each word carries with it may not have an exact match in another language.  The indistinctness in this translation process is clearly seen in these poetry examples.

            The very personal way a poet uses language to create certain feelings, tones, and rhythms, make the process of translation more of a personal interpretation by each translator.

A great deal of the power of poetry comes through the imagery shaped in the mind of the reader.  Following the two translations and the original poems, distinctions in imagery that each translator tried to convey are listed. 

 

Como Era Espana

 

Era Espana tirante y seca, diurno tambor de son opaco, llanura y nido de aguilas, silencio de azotada intemperie.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Spain Was

 

Arid and taut-day’s drumskin, a sounding opacity; that’s how Spain was; an eerie for eagles, flat-landed, a silence under the thong of the weathers. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Spain Was Like

 

Spain was tense and lean, a daily drum of opaque sound, plain land and eagle’s nest, silence of scourged inclemency.

 

 

 

 

 

 

           

            The first translation revealed a dry and tight drum skin; whereas, the second one used the words tense and lean.  How Spain Was was more descriptive when it used the word flat-land; in contrast, What Spain Was Like just used the word plainland.  Lastly, the picturesque view of a thong held down by weather is more vivid than scourged inclemency or stormy weather.

 

Explico Algunas Cosas     A Few Things Explained                  I Explained a                                                                                               Few Things

 

Preguntaries: Y donde      You will ask:  And where            You will ask: And where

estan las lilas? Y la           are the lilacs? And the                are the lilacs?  And the

metafisica cubierta de      metaphysics muffled in               metaphysical blanket

amapolas? Y la lluvia         poppies?  And the rain                of poppies?  And the

que a menudo                  which so often has                     rain that often struck

golpeaba sus palabras       battered its words till                 your words filling them

llenandolas de agujeros    they spouted up gullies               with holes and birds?

y pajaros?                        and birds?

 

Os voy a contra todo lo    I’ll tell you how matters              I am going to tell you

que me pasa.                   stand with me.                          all this is happening to

                                                                                      me.

-Pablo Neruda                            Translated by – Ben Belitt                 Translated by – Donald D. Walsh

 

           

            In A Few Things Explained, “muffled in poppies” is an action, whereas “blanket of poppies” in I Explain A Few Things is a physical object.  The word “battered” gives the image of more than once; the word “struck” gives the image of one hit. “Gullie” in the first translation creates a picture of a trench; while, “holes” in the second translation creates a picture of an opening.  Finally, “matters stand with me” produces a feeling; and, “all that is happening to me” is more of an action.