Growing up, everybody in my house, except for my mom, only spoke English. My mom spoke Bangla as well, since both of her parents did when she grew up, but there wasn’t anyone she could talk to in Bangla in our house. In middle school, we were told to choose if we wanted to learn Spanish, French, or Italian. My parents told me to take Spanish, since it would probably be the most useful in the future, and I’ve stuck with it ever since. Evidently, my exposure to other languages has been rather limited. As a result, I learned so much this week from our guest speakers, who so openly and brilliantly shared their cultures with us.
I was fascinated by Wei Gong’s breakdown of the Chinese language. I never knew that it is such a tonal language, and how people who speak different dialects can communicate in writing, but not through speech. It is so interesting how across the world, so many entirely different systems were developed to achieve the same goal of communication. I wonder how differences in the basic structures of languages affect people as they try to learn other languages, or how this might affect the way someone thinks about the world.
I didn’t know much about Ethiopian culture, even though I love the food, so I really enjoyed Gebremedhin’s presentation as well. It was very interesting to learn that Ethiopians have 13 months instead of 12, and that there are 84 languages and at least 200 dialects across Ethiopia. Fazal also said that there are 86 languages in Pakistan. These facts make me think a lot about how vast our world is, and how many people lead completely different lives, speaking completely different languages, that somehow developed (at least for some) independently of each other.
An interesting theme I noticed across some of the speakers was how their own culture has been influenced by other cultures. For example, Adriana talked about how there is a German village in Venezuela. She also discussed all the places Venezuelans have traveled to in order to escape the country’s instability. Beth was a perfect example of this global connectivity, as she is so deeply rooted in Brazil even though she wasn’t born there. Denuwan explained how Sinhalese is one of two main languages in Sri Lanka, and addressed the influence of southern India on Sri Lanka, which is evident in the other main language, Tamil. As Wei explained, the word “individual” didn’t exist in the Chinese language before it was translated from western languages. And, of course, each of the guest speakers themselves are currently living in the U.S., while belonging to their own cultures as well.
There are some topics that I would like to explore further, based on what we learned this past week. For example, I would love to know more about Ethiopia, and how it compares to other African countries based on the fact that it was never colonized. Also, I would be interested to know if there are any aspects of their own cultures that our speakers have grown uncomfortable with, or maybe just have more complicated thoughts about, now that they live in the U.S. In addition, I’m curious about how the cultures of the countries that surround the countries we learned about compare to each other.
