minorandom #6: language

oh wow. It's May 30th.

I am not dead.
I am alive *in a sense*.
Even though it might not seem so judging from the lack of recent posts.
I DID mention that I have commitment issues. Even with non-tangible, conceptual things.

Warning: Since I've been feeding my brain with psychology-related stuff these past few months, use of jargon is inevitable >.<..Sorry!

Also, I didn't have the motivation to type my thoughts out for the world to see.
Life has been a lackluster blend of routine and stress spurts.
And sleepless nights.
And research papers.
And peer-reviewed journals.
And knowledge, somewhat. The stress is interfering with the learning, really.

The state of my mind right now can be pictured as a bleak, dry desert after sunset.
Dead. Dark. Cold.
With shadows lurking around the corner threatening to possess.
lol i should've been a bloody poet.

But one thing has been keeping it moving, and that's the occasional thinking.

So I've been bombarded by language lately.
Well, synthesis/opinion/research of language really.
Language, I've been bombarded with since birth. ;)

And all the exposure has given rise to thoughts that I rarely vocalise *in part due to it being lost the very second someone interferes with my musings*. But when I'm alone, I find the thoughts lurking still at the back of my mind somewhere.

When I talk about exposure, I really mean it. Coming from a multi-racial, thus multi-lingual country, of course I'd be exposed to many many different kinds of phonemes, morphemes, syntax and all those things that make up spoken languages. I've always liked to classify exactly which sounds belong to what, and there really is no problem in doing that when I was younger; I was exposed to mainly only 4 types of languages which are very easily distinguishable.

And that was because I was exposed to mainly 4 types of races + English, which is my second language.

So when I was younger (like pre/primary school age ok) and didn't know any better, I thought that a particular language can only be spoken by the race it belonged to. That somehow, magically, i.e. an Indian baby is born with Tamil/Hindi hard-wired into him. Cool eh?

Of course all that is bullshit. But that was really what I thought. I had thoughts like "I'm not Chinese, so that's why I can't understand what the Chinese people say"...The concept of learning a language did not even crossed my mind.

So bottomline is: As a kid, I was so used to segregation, that it became a norm. I breathed it.

I automatically classified people, and their language, into neat little categories: race. And if that wasn't bad enough, my in-group, which is my own race, had certain opinions about the out-group, which are the other races. And I believed it. I believed every single last one of them possessed irreversible traits that my friends and parents told me to be aware of. And that, dear readers, is how we gain stereotypes and prejudice of others.

At least in my case.

Coming back to exposure... So as I grew older, I got exposed to more people. Suddenly, as I looked around, there were Koreans, Japanese, Africans who spoke differently, Europeans who also spoke languages that sounded different from one another, etc. I mean, I knew there were different countries in a continent and all that, but at that time only did I realise that just because you look a certain way, doesn't mean you are tied down to only certain types of languages.

A Scot can always learn Urdu, for example. Random. Yes. I just am.

I started frequenting shopping malls sans parental supervision at the age of 11/12.

Back then, I was free to do whatever I liked during those little pockets of freedom-time and sometimes when I'm alone (waiting for friends to come, waiting for the taxi/train to arrive), I would always find myself listening. To all these foreign conversations.

And I would always feel the NEED to understand what everyone's saying. Call me a busybody, but I was seriously interested in sponging up any languages I can learn. If it was up to me back then, I would've liked to learn all the languages that existed in the world. But of course, being a sensible 12 year old, I squished that desire and was content with the two languages that I understood.

Sensible children make terrible, inexperienced/unskilled/inexperienced adults by the way.

But that didn't stop me from feeling like an alien in my own world. Heck, my own country. My own city, even.

And because of this long-lost thought, recently I've been thinking: What is language? How is it that this communication medium able to simultaneously able to unite and separate people? Wouldn't the world be better off if there was only one, common language that everyone spoke?

Wouldn't it?

It would certainly be handy when one day we find aliens trying to rule the earth. *touchwood*

Well I don't have the answer. It's totally subjective too, really. There are pros and cons to having different languages exist in this world of ours.

Oh ya and it doesn't help that I came across a show about language and its acquisition. One of the case studies was of a child/adolescent who had his brain's left hemisphere removed as a treatment for epilepsy *if I'm not mistaken* but is still able to understand language normally.

It's called hemispherectomy or something like that. But there were some drawbacks on speaking, poor kid :(...I hope one day we'll find better methods as treatment >.<...

I had other, random insights on language as well. Such as written English words: Initially a word is just an amalgamation of letters from the alphabet. But as you keep on using them and familiarise with them, one day they will no longer be just a jumble of letters. They will become a heuristic (mental shortcuts) for concepts and objects.

I think this can be tested easily, too. But writing about it will have to wait. For now, I am happy that I've re-acquainted myself with my blog. Lol. To wrap this up, here are two quotes I have taken an interest in (and taken upon myself to put together):

"But I've often wondered, what if all of us in the world discovered that we were threatened by an outer - a power from outer space, from another planet... Wouldn't we all of a sudden find that we didn't have any differences between us at all, we were all human beings, citizens of the world, and wouldn't we come together to fight that particular threat?"

Ronald Reagan (1985, 1988)