Saturday, April 24, 2004
(6:47 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Questions about Language
Is it possible to write something in one's native tongue that can be universally and transparently translated? Free of idioms, of puns, of any idea that can't be said in every language in the world (generating a translation that will never require footnotes)? Imagine attempting such a thing, even with your limited knowledge of foreign languages -- even if you know it's impossible, what would you do if you were to try? Would a text that attempted this feat be readable by native speakers? (What about music as a "universal language"? Or, better, mathematics?)
Isn't there more than one way to handle dialects? English is not a phonetic language -- in many cases pronunciations do not correspond to spelling. Why not write a novel in which, for example, the black characters get to have the standard spellings, while words are phonetically misspelled for any white characters, to indicate a "white accent"? Is there something about the politics of language that would make such a novel impossible -- or even obscene?
(The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn carries this logic to the extreme, endowing everyone, even the narrator, with an "accent." One wonders, however, if this is merely an emperical matter, a product of the novel's setting in the South -- does the Northerner's "non-accent" implicitly hold the place of the universal dialect?)
