A Czech Proverb

Kolik jazyků znáš, tolikrát jsi člověkem.

You live a life for every language you speak.

---

I love this proverb.

It's simple, powerful and true, like all proverbs, but without a popular counterpart in English-speaking culture that would make it feel cliché and dead. We've all heard "birds of a feather" and lines like it way too many times for it to mean anything anymore. That's what's great about other languages' proverbs— they're all about the same stuff, but coming from such a totally different angle that you're capable of experiencing their elegance and profundity all over again, like a child.

Let's look at it literally. "Kolik jazyků znáš," word for word, is "how many tongues you know". (Interesting how 'tongue' is a synonym for "language" here as well!) "Tolikrát jsi člověkem" is trickier: "so many you are a human". So the proverb tells us not about lives, but about people. And this is so true. People tell me that they just feel different when thinking in another language, as if they have many selves—not fractured, but distributed, like colours.

And I like the ominous implication that a monoglot lives only once. Want to be immortal? Crack open those books and turn on Telemundo.

Moral of the story: languages are cool.

[Irrelevant PS: the first translation my dictionary offers for the word "člověkem" is "joker", not "human". Other translations are "subject", "soul" and "heart". I dig how these concepts are conflated into one word—especially "joker". It reminds me of "The Solitaire Mystery" by Jostein Gaarder, author of the great philosophy primer "Sophie's World", and of the neo-Jungian philosophy that Professor Jordan Peterson enjoys. For Gaarder, the philosopher is a joker, the misfit card not easily categorized, even ostracized, but with immense, subtle, metasystemic power. For Peterson, the joker is the Trickster, part of the great archetype of the Child or Selfhood. Either way, the joker is a metonym for human wisdom and human nature. Not that this is probably why the words are synonyms in Czech, but I think it's cool that they make sense together on this (extremely academic and arcane) level.]

Hide and Seek (Imogen Heap)

Apparently I'm the last person on earth to discover it, but this song is excellent. Ignore the video, that part kind of sucks. But the music! Thinking of covering it with two singers and a cello.

The Amazing Eight-Handed Cello

I like music, random silly music-related things, and cellos. So this is a good pick for the first video I'll be posting here: four men playing one cello. Enjoy.

Fwends

Thanks for linking to me, "aznkay". I have no idea who this "Joshy Woshy Wikipenislar" is, but I appreciate the hits.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Josh. I've been needing a place to put all the random stuff that floats around my brain, and this blog is going to be it. Come, share in my mental randomness.

Words without importance

Ainsi le petit prince, malgré la bonne volonté de son amour, avait vite douté d'elle. Il avait pris au sérieux des mots sans importance, et il est devenu très malheureux.

“J'aurais dû ne pas l'écouter,” me confia-t-il un jour, “il ne faut jamais écouter les fleures. Il faut les regarder et les respirer. La mienne embaumait ma planète, mais je ne savais pas m'en réjouir …

"Je n'ai alors rien su comprendre … les fleurs sont si contradictoires! Mais j'étais trop jeune pour savoir l'aimer …

---

So the little prince, in spite of all the good will that was inseparable from his love, had soon come to doubt her. He had taken seriously words which were without importance, and it made him very unhappy.

“I ought not to have listened to her,” he confided to me one day. “One never ought to listen to the flowers. One should simply look at them and breathe their fragrance. Mine perfumed all my planet. But I did not know how to take pleasure in all her grace...

“The fact is that I did not know how to understand anything ... Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her...”

— Le Petit Prince/The Little Prince — Antione de Saint-Exupéry —