from a book about words...

My current reading has a passage by Dragan Velikic. He is a Jugoslav writer that mentions his experience with Hungarian. The two languages are geographically proximate, but linguistically they are extremely far removed.

Now at some point in my life I have had instructional contact with English, French, German, Jugoslav and in an informal degree, Spanish and Finnish as well. The book I am reading is largely about intriguing words from other languages that don't have a direct translation into English.

Velikic relates this story, and because of similar experiences I have had, I found it charming and wanted to share it:

"I have a large collection of Hungarian words in my head, a collection that is both full and empty at the same time. Full, because I remember the words, I can repeat them, they exist, they exist even for me, as mine - a kind of souvenir of the past from a life I am only now starting anew.

Empty because I do not know what all these words mean. I remember the words the way one remembers one's own name... For instance: Pillango utca. I translated that name to myself as "Pillango Street," in other words, I did not translate it at all, convinced that it was a name, a street bearing somebody's name.

I walked through Budapest as if I had just arrived in Babylon where, by the grace of a god who had yet to become angry or disappointed, everything had a personal name, untranslatable, and thus immediately understandable.

Nothing about that feeling changed even when my friend explained to me smilingly that pillango means "butterfly." You are talking about the street of butterflies, she said, about Butterfly Street.

But the word pillango was ever after engraved in my mind as the name of a butterfly. There was a "Pillango butterfly" and it lived in Budapest."

The Czechs have a proverb that suggests (roughly) that you live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language you only live once. If any of you paid attention to the 50 questions about yourself thing that appeared a short while back, you might remember that I wished I could be a musician. That is because it is another language as well.

Hope you liked the story...