Ghosts & Limitations

It is probably not a great observation that travel makes one lonely. But there is something really visceral that wells up whenever I travel to Europe. It does not ruin my vacation, my sightseeing, my exchange or anecdotes or my systematic wating to have this whole place dug. But language barriers strike me really hard. Why? Well, it's one thing to say that people are separated by artificial borders which don't actually correspond to anything in reality. We can go ahead and chant obsenities at formalities and customs agants. (We really don't; at the very least it is not advisable.) But language barriers are real and tangible. The greatest accident of historical contingency. I realize the Bible has beaten me to this obervation, attributing it to the cruel whims of a jealous God, but it's worth exploring.

Our stories and literatures and humour and wisdom is forever incomplete so long as the sounds I make don't set off the appropriate neural events in you. We cannot be fully interacting humans so long as we just stand here on this platform, gesture and smile dumbly. If we are lucky, we find an inadequate lingua franca in which we can get by, in which we can make trite comments and alugh out of pity at attempted wit. It is sad. I hate being limited by what I can say. It is sad and it is lonely.

When I start using one-syllable words, you know I'm at the end of my attempts at eloquence and I am beginning my descent into over-emotiveness. There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling. But at least I can try to make my linguistic community understand.

Consider: Some languages sound more jolly than others. Is there something to that?