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LIVING IN BABEL

THE LANGUAGE OF LIFE | March 31st 2008

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Westerners tend to forget that for much of the world being polyglot has been a necessity for survival. Gideon Lichfield, the Jerusalem correspondent of The Economist, describes his obsession with what is lost in translation ...

Most foreign correspondents become obsessed with something in the end. It might be weapons systems, education statistics or the history of Caucasian hill tribes. In my case it's languages.

Ten years on various continents have given me fluency, more or less, in Spanish, French, Russian and Hebrew (though most of them I didn't start from scratch), plus a working knowledge of spoken Arabic and Portuguese. I confess to enjoying the awed looks on people's faces when I rattle off this list, but I feel a little guilty. A gift for languages is really no different from perfect pitch or long legs, and it usually comes at the expense of something else. I have a terrible memory for names and faces--not good for a journalist.

Besides, Westerners, with their stable countries and solid borders, tend to forget that for much of the world (and indeed for much of Western history) being polyglot has been a necessity for survival. On the Ukrainian-Slovakian border, a region across which the borders of empires have swept back and forth like windscreen wipers, I met office assistants who were fluent in Ukrainian, Slovakian, Hungarian and Russian as well as German or English; nobody found this remarkable. Israel, where I live now, is still home to post-war immigrants from Europe who speak seven or eight languages. Amos Oz, a prominent Israeli novelist, writes in his autobiography of growing up in a house that had books in 16 languages on its shelves.

My obsession, on which I'll be expounding this week, is how languages are constructed and the differences in how they express things.

To be honest, it borders on nerdiness. I spend spare moments wondering why a sexy outfit "gets attention" in English but "calls attention" in Spanish, or why a "working assumption" is rendered in Hebrew as an "assumption of work". Had I stayed in England, I would surely spend weekends on platforms writing down train numbers.

Still, differences in idiom do teach us about culture and history. Where an English-speaker says "the die is cast", a Mexican says "the rice is cooked". The proverb "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" becomes, in Russian, "When there are no fish, even a crab is a fish," which reveals a surprising amount about what survival once entailed for the typical Russian peasant. (I admit, though, to being baffled by the cruder popular version of this phrase, "When there are no birds, even an arse is a nightingale.")

Languages also sometimes contain enigmatic archaeological clues. These come to light especially where languages of the same family diverge. For instance, Hebrew and Arabic share an essentially identical root for the verb "to write": katav/katab. The verb spawns nouns: a letter (the kind you send by post) is maktuub in Arabic and mikhtav in Hebrew. But while a book in Arabic is kitaab, in Hebrew it is sefer, which comes from the verb for "to tell"; a story is sipur. In other words, in Arabic a book is something you write; in Hebrew it is something you relate.

Why? One explanation suggests itself to me. For the first phase of Jewish history, the Torah, the first five books of the bible, was handed down from generation to generation along with a separate "Oral Torah", which was essential to interpreting the written version. Not until the destruction of the Second Temple in 70AD and the subsequent dispersal of the Jews was the Oral Torah written down, becoming the Talmud, which enumerates all the Jewish laws. In other words, for the ancient Hebrews, the book--the very first book--was a thing not only written, but also told.

Still, that's just my speculation. And if that seems too cerebral, an entertaining pastime is to hunt for words that are either missing from a language, or unique to it. We've all chuckled over how only Germans could dream up Schadenfreude and how the English can't say bon appetit because their cooking is so bad. However, I can tell you that not one of the languages I have studied has a word for "accountability".

I went to many conferences in Latin America where, after a long discourse about corruption and bad governance, someone would inevitably declare, "Necesitamos accountability". Unfortunately, the plea never produced discernible results.

(*This is the first instalment of a diary on language, published on Economist.com. Gideon Lichfield is also the author of Fugitive Peace, a blog about covering Israel and Palestine. )