Beautiful Faulty Languages

Language is by far one of the greatest inventions of humankind, with it we stopped being mundane animals to become a species with unforseen capabilities. Language allows us to extend our communication to much complexer messages, often allowing others to understand what our desires are or discuss about the strategy to follow for a more efficient collaboration. Language has been evolving alongside us, an evolution that is still ongoing to adapt to the new needs of the speakers.

We humans have adopted words so deep into us that we use them to think, to express ourselves or to act; words are both the shield and the sword in most of our everyday battles. Often words are the means to solve problems or even heal some illnesses, as psychologists often use them to pull the right strings on us that will initiate the process of cure. We are so comfortable around words and language that we no longer use them as they are intended, but also make use of figures of speech to not just communicate but do it beautifully. One of the factors to judge a book is by how elegant its written language is, sometimes the plot might be somewhat simple, but how it is written might elevate the book to one of our favourites.

But going back to the evolution of language, different people/ tribes had different needs, and so languages have been diverging from the original root (if there was ever any), to be more distinct from each other. Nowadays we can take two languages and observe how their common traits and their differences. Just as the selective pressures that drive evolution for populations, language is also submitted to its own selective pressures, some of them can be simplicity, adaptation to describe the environment, personality traits of the speakers, geographical expansion, age of the language, inter-relation between speakers, etc.

This causes that for some aspects, language A will appear incomplete in front of language B, while for some others it might be the other way around. For me, learning languages is not just about being able to communicate using them, but also discovering the flaws of languages that I knew as complete. This search for the incomplete is always accompanied by the awareness of a gap in other languages, some missing ability to refer to certain situations or the literal lack of words. Also when filling these gaps, my horizons widen, as I am able to refer to something that I couldn’t before, sometimes to something that I never thought it could exist.

Another of the reasons why uncovering such faults is enriching is because they only arise after the long and expensive process of learning a language and becoming fluent(ish) in it. Some of these can be the lack of passing additional information within the same word (for example indicating gender when referring to people or timescale by adding suffixes to words). Others (and often the ones I enjoy the most) are the use of one single word to denote what otherwise requires many of them, and sometimes not even achieving the same meaning. At times it is just one language the one that seems to miss the word, at others such word is specific to one single language.

One example of the former is the lack of the verb to become in Spanish, the verb become can be inherently different to transform or convert to, as it can refer to the process of change that one experiments after a nice effort, and so far I have not found a word in Spanish that reflects this same meaning (but Catalan esdevenir or Italian diventare) wonderfully capture this meaning.

An example of words only present in one language could be the word Mamihlapinatapai in yaghan (indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego), this word refers to the look between two people who want to initiate something but neither of them dares to make the first step.