Friday, March 25, 2005

Hegel on saying everything in your own language

From an article by Tilottama Rajan printed in the lit, history and philosophy of history journal CLIO (Winter 2004)....

A fragment from Hegel (1803):

"It belongs to the highest cultural development of the people to say everything in their own language. The concepts that we mark with foreign words seem to be themselves foreign and not to belong to us immediately as our own."

Notes:
: What of the idea that one gains insight into a race/culture through its untranslatable/difficult to translate words? How can one culture assimilate the culture specific words from another culture?
: The emergence of a "migrant dialect" (say in communities of the Diaspora, this Greeklish) of mixing words from mother tongue with second tongue? Concepts from the old world (the familiar world which becomes foreign due to distance) being translated into the new world (the foreign world which becomes familiar)? A hybrid language.

Comments? Anyone? I'm not really sure what I'm on about. Just that it is interesting.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home