An American education expert said a few months ago that a good education no longer requires the study of foreign languages, since artificial intelligence is already capable of instant translations, and that time can be put to better use in other subjects. A good command of English is sufficient, he concluded. What can we say? Much has been said about the effects of language study on intelligence; Napoleão Mendes de Almeida, in his unsurpassed Latin Grammar, argues in favor of Latin. For someone whose mother tongue is English, however, there may be nothing more relevant to his intellectual development than to learn, desesperately, as early as possible, a syntactically more complex language—even Spanish will suffice. But how to convince the expert? If he does not realize it immediately, perhaps there is no solution. His perspective must be reversed: the man of the future, the more advantages he enjoys, the more he will have to strive not to squander abilities that only focused effort can develop.
Tag: languages
It Is a Real Shame That the Average Student…
It is a real shame that the average student can only learn a handful of languages in depth, some of which, in truth, he may never learn sufficiently. And then one depends on translations which, as a rule, hide qualities of the original. The most unfortunate thing is that one cannot grasp the beautiful particularities of distant languages, which would completely alter one’s understanding of their works. Sometimes, quite happily, a translation provides glimpses of such particularities; and, having grasped them, we are left with the sad feeling that, in this life, it will not be possible to get to know them better…
Of All the Languages in the World…
Of all the languages in the world, English seems to be the most deceptive, since it is learned with an ease that completely falsifies its real dimension. The tourist who has learned to order a coffee at the airport believes he has mastered it; but if, by chance, he tries to read a novel by Dickens, or a poem by Milton, Byron or Chaucer, he realizes in a few lines that he knows nothing about the language he has learned. And the curious thing is that, syntactically, English is always the same: the structure of the periods never complicates understanding too much. But literary English is a dungeon into which the foreigner always enters without a flashlight. The words, the infinite expressions, obscure and untranslatable, are like hauntings. It takes a lot of courage to understand it and face it as a writer.
The Phonic and Syntactic Richness of Portuguese
The phonic and syntactic richness of Portuguese, more than the nature of its people or the flair of its authors, places its poetry among the most remarkable in world literature. As a vehicle for expressing the primitive impulse represented by poetry, its possibilities are so varied and its effects so unique that, even when worked on by ordinary hands, it sometimes achieves results worthy of sincere admiration.