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| Sunday, 6 January 2002 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Take my word by J.B. Disanayaka Human beings, wherever they are, tend to feel alike but tend to think differently. For they put these feelings into different words in different ways. It is their languages that make them think differently. Do the French and the English think alike? No, they think differently, because the French world "poisson" means "fish" in English. That's how one man's fish becomes another man's poison! To indicate a very small amount, English speakers use the words "an atom" or "an iota" as when they speak of "an atom of truth" or "an iota of truth". For the Sinhalese, the smallest bit is "a pollen of a mustard flower" (aba mal re:nuvak). Aba mal, in Sinhala, is the yellow flower of the mustard plant, and nothing is smaller than a bit of its pollen (renu). "Remu" is a plural noun and its singular indefinite noun is "renuvak" (a pollen). English speakers "smoke" their cigarettes and cigars but the Sinhalese "drink" them. For the Sinhalese use the word "bonava" (to drink) not only with words that refer to drinks such as milk (kiri) and water (vatura) but also with "sigaret" (cigarettes) and "suruttu" (cigars). The English sign board "No Smoking" goes in Sinhala as "dum bima tahanam", literally, as "No Drinking Smoke"! You may not believe me, but take my word for it. People who speak different languages live in different worlds, and their worlds of reality are created mainly by their languages. Moving from one langauge to another is thus a very fascinating experience, and in this series of articles, "Take My Word", I wish to take you from the fascinating world of Sinhala reality to that of the English. |
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