On the Exotic
Nov. 10th, 2002 03:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThe last paragraph of the notes on the back of Negotiating with the Dead reads as follows:
"Margaret Atwood has been acclaimed for her talent for portraying both personal lives and problems of universal concern. Her work has been published in more than thirty-five languages, including Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic, and Estonian."
The first half of the paragraph describes Atwood's wok as being of universal interest. The second half of the paragraph describes some of the languages--presumably the relatively exotic languages, the unexpected languages--into which her work has been translated. Yet, if her works are so universally of interest, why shouldn't they be translated into these languages? Japan's is the largest national economy after the United States' and China, South Korea should rightly take Canada's place in the G-8 (or more properly Russia's), Iceland and Finland are two of the most developed countries in the world, Estonia is one of the quickest developing, and Turkey is definitely not a society to be underrated. Altogether, I think that some 250 million people speak the national languages of these six nations as first languages. Compare this to the 90 millions who speak German as a first language, the 160-170 million who speak Russian, et cetera.
Another note: Five of these languages likely bear some distant mutual relationship. Estonian and Finnish, for instance, are two languages no more different from each other than French and Italian, say, or English and Dutch, while these two Finnic languages are distantly related to Turkish. Turkish, in turn, may bear some distant relationship to Korean and Japanese. Korean and Japanese are likely distant relatives, inasmuch as they share basic elements of syntax though their vocabularies are quite different; the latest historical/linguistic theory seems to hold that the Japanese islands were settled by migrants from Korea whose proto-Korean language was eventually overwhelmed by the proto-Korean language variant that eventually developed into Korean. Icelandic, a well-documented Germanic language, is unrelated, but it comes from the same Nordic cultural complex as Finnish and Estonian; indeed, like those two languages, it comes from the peripheries of Norden.
"Margaret Atwood has been acclaimed for her talent for portraying both personal lives and problems of universal concern. Her work has been published in more than thirty-five languages, including Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic, and Estonian."
The first half of the paragraph describes Atwood's wok as being of universal interest. The second half of the paragraph describes some of the languages--presumably the relatively exotic languages, the unexpected languages--into which her work has been translated. Yet, if her works are so universally of interest, why shouldn't they be translated into these languages? Japan's is the largest national economy after the United States' and China, South Korea should rightly take Canada's place in the G-8 (or more properly Russia's), Iceland and Finland are two of the most developed countries in the world, Estonia is one of the quickest developing, and Turkey is definitely not a society to be underrated. Altogether, I think that some 250 million people speak the national languages of these six nations as first languages. Compare this to the 90 millions who speak German as a first language, the 160-170 million who speak Russian, et cetera.
Another note: Five of these languages likely bear some distant mutual relationship. Estonian and Finnish, for instance, are two languages no more different from each other than French and Italian, say, or English and Dutch, while these two Finnic languages are distantly related to Turkish. Turkish, in turn, may bear some distant relationship to Korean and Japanese. Korean and Japanese are likely distant relatives, inasmuch as they share basic elements of syntax though their vocabularies are quite different; the latest historical/linguistic theory seems to hold that the Japanese islands were settled by migrants from Korea whose proto-Korean language was eventually overwhelmed by the proto-Korean language variant that eventually developed into Korean. Icelandic, a well-documented Germanic language, is unrelated, but it comes from the same Nordic cultural complex as Finnish and Estonian; indeed, like those two languages, it comes from the peripheries of Norden.
