Pilgrim in the Palace of Words

Back in Greek class, I remember Amanda Eve noting one time the different constructions that different languages have for basic concepts. For instance, in English we say, "I am tired," but the French say, "Je suis fatigue," or "I have tiredness." She wondered aloud whether phrasing such descriptions as something we are or something we have affects how we think about ourselves and our attributes. And I found that fascinating.

That's what I thought of when I saw this book. "Pilgrim in the Palace of Words is about language, about the words that splash and chatter across our tongues... Glenn Dixon... travels to the Earth's four corners to explore the way these languages create and mould societies." I put the book on my wish list, and then received it as a gift. (Thanks Justin!)

To be honest, I don't think it quite lived up to the promise of the back cover. Rather than being a language book with some travel thrown in, it was more of a travel book with some language thrown in. It was interesting, but I really wanted to read about languages! There was great potential: the author did a degree in language consciousness, "what it meant to think in one language as opposed to thinking in another." (49) But I guess he thought a book like that wouldn't sell, because at one point, after discussing a specific grammatical point that fascinated me, he basically apologized for boring the reader.

As I flip through the book after finishing it, I am finding a lot more on language than originally stood out to me. Dixon discusses the connections between languages, the history and migration of languages, and how we can linguistically trace the migration of people. He talks about how words in one language carry vast connotations that cannot be easily translated into another tongue. "When the world becomes homogenized, something is lost. Even if it's only a name, we lose a little part of the soul of that place." (13) The book also explores how many languages (other than English) have a system of social stratification (147). Like the tu and vous of French, you speak differently depending on who are addressing, and the language has a means of defining relationships between people.

There were a few times when Dixon hints at the language questions I was hoping for in this book. He asks, "What about the way a language makes you feel? What about the way it makes you think? What about the way it makes ... you?" (66) Also, he notes that: "Speaking a language is a whole way of being. You can feel it in the very sounds of the words (French, phonetically, tends to be a bit more forward in the mouth than English). And that's even before you get to the meanings, the ways languages describe the world. Languages are direct reflections of ourselves. We think in them. We dream in them. We exist in them." (34) I guess I was just looking for more of this, and I find myself considering further study on the topic.