Saturday, March 19, 2011

Language is kinda' like Music

I was wandering in the southwestern Sahara Desert a while back. I had been trying to get to Mozambique, and somehow took a wrong turn. Before you know it, I was completely lost, and could only see sand for miles and miles.
Well, to make a long story short, I probably would have died there, but I was rescued by an African bushman, who, I guess you could say, was the closest you could come to an expert on surviving in the Sahara. Anyway, he did manage to get me back to civilization before he vanished back into the African wilderness.
The point of all this, is that communication was a rather difficult affair between myself and my African friend. The bushman language is composed not just of the usual phonetic language sounds, but also a series of clicking noises as well. If you can think of most western languages as different forms of popular music, for instance, English upon occasion can have a kind of countryish rock'n'roll sound to it. French can sound a bit like a soft romantic musical language, while Chinese (I am thinking more of Cantonese than Mandarin, here) can sound like a crazy Eastern Opera, if you can imagine such. So, Bushman I think, would sound like progressive jazz (a loosely structured kind of jazz music), which even lovers of jazz have a hard time understanding, or appreciating, in many cases.
But all in all, it was surely one of my more interesting adventures, of which, in order to protect the innocent as well as those not so innocent, I can tell you no more.
So, as the famous fictional character, Forest Gump, would say: That's all I have to say about that.

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