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A NEW LOOK AT CANTONESE EXPLETIVES
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and none at all of that cross-thread I mentioned, which all the time we are speaking one phrase is guiding us away from a score of similar phrases which are not what we mean. This constant unconscious avoidance of saying what we don't mean is the pattern we must all set up when we would speak a second, third or fourth language.
I hope what I am about to say will help you in this task. For most of us, when children, were crippled by being brought up to talk only one language; to those whose minds have been thus crippled, like the girls of Manchu China whose feet used to be bound in childhood, the idea of "thinking in a language" is as natural as the unnatural tiptoe tottering gait seemed the "natural" way for women to walk. The unbinding of bound feet was, I am told, a very painful matter and after a certain age could not safely be done.
So come, if you dare, and let me unbind your linguistic feet.
English is a language of the Indo-European family: a family the branches of which extend from Sanskrit, Old Persian and their descendants in South-Central Asia, through the Slavonic languages of Eastern Europe, Lithuanian and the Celtic languages (originally of Asia Minor, but now found only on the Atlantic and Baltic shores), Ancient and Modern Greek, the languages of ancient Italy, through Latin to the modern Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Rumanian and Catalan, Old Norse and Icelandic down to modern Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, Gothic and Old High German down to the modern German dialects and Dutch; then again overseas with the Colonizers to North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, Southern Africa and as a second language of convenience in the shape of a special kind of English
- back to India again where it may all have started.
A great deal of work has been done on this family of languages, but it is well for us to remember that it is less than 200 years since the identity of such a family was observed and not much more than a century since Indo-European linguistic studies were firmly established.
Before that, and to some extent ever since, European scholars were taught to regard Latin and Greek as the only models of linguistic organization: therefore any language had to be studied