Reading relies, more than we often realise, on word associations. Particularly adjectivally, words can gather or lose a lot of flavour according to the writer’s choice of one word over another. Reading a book in a foreign language, one can automatically lose a lot of this feeling, struggling to get a handle on concrete meaning rather than looking for subtleties of meaning, especially when far from fluent in the language being read.
Something I am struck by in the two foreign languages I know well enough to comment on – Russian and Polish – is the relative lack of expression available in those languages, in comparison to English. Often dictionary entries for one English word have cver five or six words in Russian or Polish, and thus, as a foreigner at least, one has to wonder if the subtlety of expression we’re capable of in English would be possible at all in these languages.
Another interesting, and related, point is how the language itself controls our way of thinking. A friend of mine who speaks German says that you have to be incredibly organised in your sentences just to speak the language, and that for him this explains why a lot of Germans are such organised people in general life.
Russian is a fairly regular language in terms of declinations, but very flexible in terms of sentence structure, enabling the same sentence to be given four or five different stresses according to word order. It’s also very particular, with six grammatical cases.
I suppose that the language reflects the heavily stratified levels of etiquette in Russian society, with different forms of address and use of names according to who you’re talking to, while the grammatical cases, typical of Slavonic languages, also reflect this need to know exactly where everything stands.
On the other hand, the malleable sentences could, for the fertile mind, be the spark that fires up the ever-so rebellious Russian mind, or the rebellious literary Russian mind at least.
This is all just really half-boiled speculation of course, but I feel that there is some root underneath all this, although my knowledge of Russian leaves me unable to say much more about it.
The book itself, ‘Around the world under the Russian flag’, is a fairly dry plod through the history of Russian exploration, looking at the scrapes the sailors got into during a three year period (1803-1806) and how they escaped from them. There are a lot of ‘negotiations’ in the book, with the Russians always coming out on top, be it against the Chinese or the Native Americans. Its stoical nature is certainly something that we can still see in Russia’s foreign relations today. Never is a smile anywhere near the surface of Medvedev's or Putin’s face, apart from when strutting about in leather during victory parades of course.
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