Tag: mother tongue

watercolour portrait of a bored young woman

Actively bored

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

You will never see the peculiarities
of your own language
or really appreciate its beauty
until you learn another one.

Only after emigrating,
while delving into the intricacies of English,
did I notice that in my mother tongue
there is a construction that is contrary
to the principles of logic.

The negative concord was quite a surprise,
and once I saw it, I was baffled at
how something so obvious
had escaped my notice
for almost three decades.

On the other hand, if I think of diminutives,
English is not even remotely close
to what one can achieve in Polish.

And if the doldrums struck,
in my native language, you could say I’m bored
but also express that in a more active,
if untranslatable, form.

stack of letters of the Latin alphabet

Let’s say—future

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Imagine a simple word—let’s say—future, spoken as if it were native
to my mother tongue. It would sound something akin to foo-too-re,
with the last e pronounced as in the verb get. It sounds rather ridiculous,
doesn’t it? Perhaps this will allow you to be in my shoes for a moment,
so you know my feelings when I hear you say my name like it’s English.
It may be hard to believe, but the letters of the most widely used script,
the Latin alphabet, do not necessarily represent the same sounds
as in the current lingua franca.