Inside a multilingual mind

When I was writing my postgraduate thesis on financial translation, my supervisor asked me if I was French. He said my English language mistakes resembled those of a French native speaker. The reality is I am a Greek native speaker with English as a second language and French as a third. I have also studied Ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Norwegian and Chinese. To be honest with you, after Greek, Latin and French, all other Indo-European languages were a child’s play.

For example, it is not very difficult to guess that 'esperanza' in Spanish means hope when 'spero' in Latin means to hope and 'espère' in French also means to hope. It’s not difficult to know, when you are 5 years old, that 'pharmacy' in English means a place where you buy medicine when in your native tongue 'φάρμακο' (pharmako) means medicine. In Polish it’s 'apteka', which sounds like 'αποθήκη' (apotheke), which means warehouse or storage in Greek. After all, pharmacies are places with shelves stocked up with medicine. It is easy to remember that 'fuoco' in Italian means fire, when in Cypriot Greek 'φουκού' (foukou) means barbeque. You know 'Antropologi' in Norwegian is the study of humanity, when 'άνθρωπος' (anthropos) in Greek means human.

The mental lists of words inside a multilingual brain are long and multiple. In my brain they are categorised by language. I often feel like I have one list for French words, one for Greek, one for English, one for Spanish and so on. The word and meaning associations made across the different language lists are endless and they can take place at any point during the day or night! I remember dreaming once in black and white. The characters in my dream were speaking in English and I was seeing French subtitles, like in a movie. That was probably after a long subtitling project.

Word associations though can be dangerous, because let’s not forget about the faux amis (false friends). False friends are words in a language bearing deceptive resemblance to words of another language. For instance, 'pathetic' in English means pitiful, but 'παθητικός' (pathitikos) in Greek means passive. Translators and linguists are really cautious of false friends and ideally should not make assumptions on the grounds of resemblance. But when you have studied so many languages, that’s a big, big challenge!

Do you know more than one language?

Do you make word associations across different languages?

Share your experiences!