language

another reinux inspired thought;
it occured to me today that multi-lingual people (and i say this in observance of the contemporary trend of having tri or even tetralinguals around as formal acquaintances) seem to perceive pain differently as they switch through different languages.

let’s take english as an example.
the most oft ellicted response of a native english speaker to pain, or at least the stereotypical one, is “ouch” or “ow”. no one really knows why this unisyllabic mimetic is uttered when the pain receptors in our bodies are overloaded with electric impulses or why it is phonetically translated to “ow” or “ouch” when those impulses are then relayed into our mouths. one way to see it is that this type of response is innate and comes standard with every human being capable of feeling pain and expressing it–kinda like how a baby cries when its hungry, or when it makes a boo boo down under.

a tangent i want to add here is regarding the japanese response to pain; when a person of japanese neural configuration perceives pain he or she will usually exclaim 痛い！ or some variation of it, which curiously is assigned an actual semantic value within the language, whereas the english “ow” is just considered an onomatopoeia. (i.e., 痛い in japanese is actually classified as an adjective in some senses and an interjection in another, whereas “ow” is simply just an interjection) given the history and the composition of the japanese language, however, it may not be too far away from the truth to say that the orthographic spelling of 痛い! was actually derived from the mimetic and onomatopoeic expression; the usage of the expression was so widespread that it was eventually granted official codification as a bona fide semantic token, as opposed to an utterance of pain. a second piece of fact that supports this claim lies within the character itself; the character, which was borrowed from the era of the Wu dynasty is pronounced teng in modern mandarin, and its adaptation into the Sino-Japanese lexicon is actually tsuu, which is much closer to the mandarin than the yamato japanese expression “itai”.

going back to the main point, the idea of these painful expressions being innate also finds camaraderie through examples found in the more primative “languages” spoken on earth: those of the members of the animal kingdom. animals too seem to have a distinct way of expressing pain; dogs “woof”, cats “meow” and cows “moo”. the key point to take from this is that animals don’t communicate through producing sound unless to signal some sort of duress or to alert others from danger: dogs bark only when something auspicious is going on or when it senses trouble; cats meow when their tails have been stepped on or when they encounter something surprising or strange.

and like every rule, this one is also one with an exception; dolphins are known to communicate to each other even when they’re not distressed and monkeys also tend to make some sort of a distinguishable noise when signallling to their potential mates. but the fact remains that they all produced a disctinctive sound, different from one that they usually make when they perceive pain or s sense of dangerl and the fact that this seems to run so universally would suggest that this is an innate trait of most animals living on earth, human beings included.

so how does this relate to the bigger theme of different expressions per different languages? it probably has alot to do with the fact that language acquisition is an innate process, and the mother language usually stays engrained within the framework of a person’s linguistic composition; and no matter how proficient or fluent a person may be in a foreign language, it will always feel natural and right to express pain in the language already programmed and stored from the early periods of one’s linguistic profile rather than the newly acquiesced alternative.

or at least thats why i think i say “fuck!” when my brain is tune to speaking english and i end up reverting to “痛っ！” when i’m by myself…