“mêles-toi de tes oignons” means “mind your own business”, but literally it’s “mingle with your own onions” “avoir le cul bordé de nouilles” means “to be very lucky”, but literally it’s “to have one’s ass outlined with noodles” “pleuvoir comme vache qui pisse” means “to rain cats and dogs”, but literally it’s “to rain like a cow pissing” “ça casse pas trois pattes à un canard” means “it’s harmless/it’s not much”, but literally it’s “it doesn’t break a duck’s 3 legs” and, the best for last, “j’en ai rien à branler” means “i don’t give a shit”, but literally it’s “there’s nothing about this i can jack off to”
Okay the quality is awful but as someone who is fluent in Irish (it’s not really called Gaelic here) they must have gotten someone professional to translate this because it’s perfect. My favourite thing is it’s very casual Irish and not the stuff you’d hear on a listening exam. This is how people actually talk in Irish. It doesn’t belong to a specific regional dialect which is interesting to me because most fluent Irish speakers are from smaller places that have their own Irish.
Overall I’m as an Irish person I’m impressed so far by these two episodes.
A few ideas for daily language habits. You can also keep track of your language habits with my printable Language Learning pages on Etsy. Just print out as many as you need and keep track of daily study habits, weekly & monthly goals, and important vocabulary.
THIS is the bear cave painting i was talking about, the line weight, the proportions, the fine details around the face, and the fact that this all had to be drawn from memory, idk man, it’s incredible to me. if i could meet one person from history it’d be the person that painted this bear 30,000 years ago
Last week, I learned that the English language has more euphemisms for death than any other language. I learned that the ancient Greeks had no word for the colour blue and that the Hawain alphabet has only twelve letters. I spent last week hollowing out a little place in my heart and filling it with worry. What does that say about us? Do we really go out of our way to avoid death like that? How did the Greeks describe the sea? Are twelve letters really enough? Does every language have a word for love? Every language should have a word for love. And compassion. And gentleness. And figs and snow and that soft sensitive part on the inside of one’s arm. We should have words for everything so that we don’t feel alone. We need very very very specific words for all of the different kinds of sad and even more specific words for the kinds of happy. What if we were able to talk about everything? I want to tell you how I feel and I want to be precise. Sometimes ‘good’ just isn’t enough and few understand what I mean when I say that I feel ’like lightning.’
All I can think abt is that one quote that basically just describes that you can’t be your true self in your native language bc there’s too much emotional attachment, but that second languages allow speakers to be truly free with their words
“Some things could only be written in a foreign language; they are not lost in translation, but conceived by it. Foreign verbs of motion could be the only ways of transporting the ashes of familial memory. After all, a foreign language is like art—an alternative reality, a potential world. »
- Svetlana Boym, “Estrangement as a Lifestyle: Shklovsky and Brodsky”
“Bilinguals overwhelmingly report that they feel like different people in different languages. It is often assumed that the mother tongue is the language of the true self. (…) But, it first languages are reservoirs of emotion, second languages can be rivers undammed, freeing their speakers to ride different currents.”
- Love in Translation by Lauren Collins from the New Yorker, August 8 & 15, 2016
One uncanny aspect of translating is when I am grappling with a sentence that would sound particularly wrong if I tried to preserve any part of the original structure or idioms, because nothing about it matches the way one would phrase such an idea in my language, so what I need to do is mentally divorce the sentence from its syntax and vocabulary, to try and find how my language would give form to the same concepts. It always makes me wonder, what am I working with here? What is left when you remove the grammar and specific word choices from a sentence? I don’t know, a shapeless mental porridge of pure meaning, a nebulous feeling of what another brain has tried to express. I find it amazing that your mind knows just what to do with something so unfathomable—that it’s just like “right, right, give me a minute” as it distillates meaning out of words like it’s nothing then lassoes it down from the platonic realm of forms to give it a completely new shape. What is ‘meaning’ and how does it exist in your mind in this liminal moment after you’ve extracted it from a foreign language but haven’t yet found words in your own language that can embody it? I don’t know.
