Bilingual

Same concept, dfferent language

Don’t know if it is a matter of age, but when one is what can be considered bilingual, and the equivalent of a word in that other language refuses to come to mind, one starts worrying. At least it takes time for that word one is looking for to surface.

I don’t remember how it all started. Just why I asked my son what the Italian for fleck or speck of dust was. Don’t even remember why I was talking about dust. Probably because I saw a few specks floating in the sunbeam that comes in through the window every day warming my hands as I lie in bed and do my excercises.  No blanket needed. My son said that a small particle or speck, especially of dust, would be granello. I also asked if it might not be pulviscolo, or fine dust.That, however, refers to larger amounts that float around in a cloud. In other words, pulviscolo is a collective noun, whereas granello is singular. Just as dust is collective and mote is singular.The normal Italian would be granello di polvere. Might be a speck of dust. I’m not convinced though, for to me granello is something a bit larger, not something that can float around in the sunlight, and here the word “mote” presented itself, a mote of dust like those you sometimes see floating around in a sunbeam, those tiny specks of dust that seem to come from nowhere. A granello is something you might even touch or hold.  Therefore, granello di sabbia or a grain of sand sounds right, whereas a mote is something smaller even than a speck, which sounds too large, too tangible. Being bilingual doesn’t mean simply switching one word into its equivalent in another language. For often there is no simple equivalent.

So obviously I’m not quite in agreement with my son. Yet what are the alternatives? If I’m reading a novel, in translation, I have no choice but just to accept whatever the translator decided on. I know what is meant. I guess that’s how this discussion got started. After all, my son and I are not trying to find  a scientific definition.

So it really isn’t a stumbling block. I get the idea and continue reading.

That doesn’t stop me from thinking, though, and in trying to find a solution to my dilemma I chance upon a quote from Carl Sagan, regarding the earth. “A mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” How wonderful.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Earth is no more than Sagan’s pale blue dot, a mote suspended in time and space, where everything and everyone that ever was has lived and existed.

A universe, a sunbeam, a mote of dust.

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