This is a brief foray into a slightly different topic: what is sometimes called “Armchair Traveling.” That is, visiting other places and times through the pages of a really good book. I have had many experiences of this, and highly recommend it.
Reading stimulates the imagination in ways that does not always occur with other mediums, such as TV or movies. The visual mediums already present the viewer with the director’s choice of images: Voices and Sounds, each with their own built-in backgrounds and pre-judgements. Reading, however, opens the reader’s mind to a wealth of possibilities, limited only by one’s imagination and general understanding of Life.
Different writers have different abilities to evoke personalities, places, and times. Really good writers have the ability to place the reader in the minds and hearts of the characters, to enable them to get a glimpse into someone else’s world, and hopefully begin to experience the same things their characters do. That is the true Art of Story-Telling.
I have been a lifelong reader; my parents encouraged me and my younger brothers from a very early age. That helped a lot once we got to school, and had “studies” to contend with, on a daily basis. I, of course, did not realize that at the time. I only came to understand this intuitively many years later, when I got to university, and was exposed to a much broader range of reading than I ever had before: history, literature, drama, a wide variety of fiction, and even writings in different languages (mostly French, but also Russian).
Many recent academic studies have shown that being able to read at a third grade level, by third grade, is a good indicator of future academic progress, and personal success in navigating the world at large. Sadly, many parents do not realize the importance of learning to read early on, and that presents a formidable handicap, from third grade on. Those who cannot read face serious obstacles to gainful employment, marriage, and lifelong personal satisfaction.
Reading stimulates the imagination, and learning the “ins-and-outs” of language is a major requirement for personal “success” in today’s world, no matter how “smart” one may be. That not only means being able to navigate the business world, once one graduates from school and enters the work force; it also means being able to enjoy many aspects of life in one’s adulthood, and successfully navigate the many challenges that Life brings.
One thing that totally surprised me was learning, in college, how much languages sometimes contribute to another language. I studied two years each of both Latin and Russian, in high school, and went on to study two years of French in college – at two different universities. All of them were eye-openers.
Latin taught me about the structure of grammar in English, oddly enough. Studying Russian was another eye-opener: the grammatical structure is sometimes backwards of what we have in English. For example, in English we say, “My name is John Smith.” But in Russian, the sentence structure is literally reversed: “There is to me a name, which is John Smith.”
I was astonished to find, in my two years of studying French, in college, how many words in French translate almost directly into English. “Dormire,” the French verb for “to sleep,” translates directly into “dormant” (asleep) and “dormitory” (a place to sleep), for example. This column does not have the space to relate more examples.
What an eye-opener that was! Which is why, ever since my language studies at university, all those years ago, I have been hyper-aware that trying to communicate across different languages can be very tricky. “It all depends on the skill of the translator.” Which is why diplomats always want their own translators at meetings with those from other countries!
Many words can have different meanings – even in English, as you all know – so it becomes terribly important to weigh both context and inflection, for example.
Rafe Semmes is a proud graduate of (“the original”) Savannah High School and the University of Georgia. He may be reached at rafe_semmes@yahoo.com.
