A Universal Language

“But truth, we know, is that which clarifies, not that which confuses. Truth is the language that expresses universality. Newton did not “discover” a law that lay hidden from man like the answer to a rebus. He accomplished a creative operation. He founded a human speech which could express at one and the same time the fall of an apple and the rising of the sun. Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which is ineluctable.” — Antoine de Saint Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars

I had a conversation, not so long ago, about achieving fluency in multiple languages. I was walking through a building which had signs in four languages — French, Spanish, English, and Dutch. Each time we came to a sign my friend read it in a different language. Once, and only once, did I pause long enough to fumble through the Spanish description, and I was happy to have the English to check my translation. I felt like an idiot. And granted, this feeling had become very common over the few months I spent in Europe, but it was not more pleasant for its familiarity.

The desire to know more, to understand better, and to stop feeling ignorant has driven me to read widely, to work hard in my studies, and to ask questions from people who know more than me. But language has never been an area of focus for me. I wish I was fluent in Spanish. I think it would be fun to live abroad and immerse myself. I’ve read about the history and grammatical structure of a handful of different languages and find it interesting. But ask me to speak in either Italian or Spanish and at best you’ll get a few sentences of questionable grammar, and ask for any other language and I can guarantee you’ll receive a poorly pronounced reading from Google translate. So while I’ve thought I should spend more time and energy learning another language, it has never risen to the top of my priority queue. There was code to write, books to read, patterns to knit, friends to ask about their studies, mountains to climb. To use the words I hate: there was never time. But a single conversation has been reshaping my priorities.

I’ve always thought it was interesting to hear people talk about how they dream. I knew someone who never dreamed in color. Someone who dreamed in words, like reading a book. And people who dream in different languages (sometimes at the same time). So it was pretty normal for me to ask my friend what language he thought and dreamt in. I was expecting him to say it depended on what language he was speaking most frequently. I guess because that’s sort of how I write computer code, which is the closest I come to being fluent in multiple languages. Instead he told me that the ideas are separate from the language. That they don’t start in words, and that he can choose in which language to describe the same thoughts. This idea, this very simple idea, is utterly incomprehensible to me. I guess this is the elusive miracle of fluency that I have yet to achieve — my thoughts are firmly rooted in English right now (with the occasional logic symbol), and at best I can translate them into another language.

I found this idea again in Wind, Sand and Stars recently. That the ideas exist, and it is only making them understandable and sharable that is difficult. That Newton, rather than being celebrated for making a discovery, should instead be celebrated as a translator. He found a way to take an idea that was seen in the natural world, and translate it into a language that could be shared between people. And for a moment, this passage made me feel less like an idiot. Because while I can’t speak any foreign languages, the sharable language celebrated in this passage is mathematics. And I can speak that tongue.

Just as quickly, however, I remembered that the only reason I was reading this book in the first place was because someone else had translated it from French into English.

Perhaps it is time to make some time to improve my language skills. Perhaps, with a little effort, I could understand this idea that some ideas are pure enough to exist outside of language. And that these ideas can be shared in many different phrasings, to many different people. Perhaps, by understanding how the ideas change from translation, I will gain a better understanding of what it was that I tried to say in the first place. Perhaps, it is time to stop writing in English and go log on to Duolingo.