languages are joy

translation joy
A personal magic. A possibility of twirling the worlds. A field of thrilling research and discovery. Compressed into seconds or extended to years. A moment of absolute efficiency. A point of intersection between logic and creation. Where non-literalness and inaccuracy can lead to greater precision.

switch joy
Sapir and Whorf say that your language determines your mind. Partly, yes. But it's possible then to have more than one thinking. Linguistic relativity as a big role-playing game. You can choose yourself a context, a culture, a frame.

perception joy
The more of languages - the wider your information channels are, more categories in your arsenal. Not only regarding the obviously increasing concrete possibilities, but also in "perceptive muscles" training in general. New dimensions incrementing. If you learn the Eskimo language, where they have scores of words for "snow", you learn to distinguish these various kinds of snow at the same time.

multilayer joy
The charm of puns, untranslatable words, calques, interlingual casuistry...

Rubik joy
An enrichment of general semantic puzzle. Insites, inspirations, sudden harmonies, missing pieces matching. A stunning perfect-fit finding. The never-ending process of exploring languages teems of all that. Within one language and inbetween, in the space of their interconnection and interpenetration. Unexpected lines are forming, connecting points you'd never align.

meta-level joy
Multilingual environments impel one more language to emerge. A bright and intense non-verbal comprehension plane, and it's not always about information transmission.

code joy
Artificial sign-systems, complicated terminologies, ciphers, cryptograms. A concentration of symbols per unit text. And the capacity of orientating in this system is the easiest confirmation of involvement.

graphic joy
Alphabets, scripts, fonts, calligraphy are not less fascinating than painting. Fine greek symbols can not only be curlicues or mathematic abstractions, they become living words, and it's a magic. Writing in sanskrit is itself a meditation.

sound joy
There are languages that sing. The ones you don't know remain pure music for you.

Fry and Laurie

...Language is a whore, a mistress, a wife, a pen-friend, a check-out girl, a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot...

Linguistic Relativity and Tao

Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (by Sapir and Whorf)

postulates that a particular language's nature influences the habitual thought of its speakers: That is, different language patterns yield different patterns of thought. This idea challenges the possibility of perfectly representing the world with language, because it implies that the mechanisms of any language condition the thoughts of its speaker community.

Tao Te Ching (translated by Stephen Mitchell) says:

The Tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
The unnameable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

what is the seafood diet?

all the food you see you eat