The Language changes you...

All this writing business is a slippery subject as it is. But try doing it in two languages... That is what I have been practising for months and my brain is going into overload. After a while, you discover you don't distinguish what is supposed to be your native tongue from the one you acquired as your second. Frankly, I do not know what language I am reading. Or writing. The man came to install my Internet and I didn't recognise the fact that my system is not set to default English. He had to point it out.

I have this theory - it's been researched, I believe; for those interested I can recommend two articles: in Daily Mail and New Scientist - that your personality changes along with the language you speak. I speak three languages, none of them very well, and I am a different person in every single one. My favourite personality is the Spanish one. I don't tend to CARE about things whilst speaking Spanish and I am cheerful. Doesn't happen in any other circumstances.

(By the way, I'd move to Spain in a heartbeat, if I could. I once spent four months there in the winter; I ate three kilos of oranges per day and got a terrible ear infection, but no colds whatsoever!)

But I have noticed something funny about writing: I make the same mistakes in both languages. I mix tenses. I get the spelling wrong in similar cases. Punctuation is my enemy... There are things I need to translate from one language to another BOTH WAYS. And sometimes... I am lost for words. Like when Troy Ragliani says to Qwerty in the ZOO: "I like giving credit when credit's due." It's what he said. I translated it word for word, because no other sentence made sense here, even though word for word translation is perhaps not the best.

Doesn't seem complicated, does it? Deceptive little nasties...

Nonetheless, a bigger issue than my writing emerges here. English has become a global lingua franca, something many people use, even in the farthest corners of the world - a function Esperanto was designed for, but that got squashed by marketing invaders from the English-speaking countries. Does that mean millions of people become different when communicating with the rest of the planet? How does that affect us, as humanity? Something to think about, perhaps.