I never said he licked my asshole: Chinese, Kopfkissenbezugen and the peculiarities of language

I'm sitting in the library, trying to work on a story and I can hear a conversation that is happening between a librarian and a Chinese woman. She is asking where something is, or why something has happened, I can't clearly hear which. Oh, I just heard that she has too many books out already. That's by the by, because what struck me about the conversation is that when she speaks, she sounds incredibly rude. Now, before you accuse me of being a massive racist, I just want to clarify I don't think she is actually being rude, but it got me thinking about the way language influences our social conduct and vice versa.

Chinese is a tonal language. This is why it is very difficult for us Westerners to master. Everything depends upon the stress that is put on homonyms, homographs, homophones, whatever definition you want to put on them, so you can determine the word's meaning. Because of this, in my non-Chinese speaking opinion, the subtleties of intonation that are part and parcel of speaking English are lost as it is through the determinative stress that we put on each word that we can ascertain whether someone is being rude, serious, sarcastic etc. Because (as it sounds to my ears) Chinese uses sometimes very forceful, nasal, slightly whining tones, it can come across as aggressive or argumentative when a native Chinese speaker engages in conversation with a native English speaker. (Just to re-iterate, I DON'T THINK THIS IS DELIBERATE RUDENESS).

I saw a fabulous tweet which I immediately re-tweeted that sums this up. It went as follows:

The phrase 'I never said he licked my asshole' has seven different meanings dependent on the stressed word.

I giggled myself silly at this. But actually, it's a brilliant way to illustrate the difficulties of communication if you do not understand the subtleties of non-intrinsically tonal languages. Just take a moment to look at the different meanings that can be ascribed to this seemingly simple sentence. Now, for ease of identification, the person who may or may not have had their asshole licked (the person saying the above phrase) will be called subject A. The other person engaged in the conversation with subject A is called subject B. The other person(s) that the story may have been reported to is subject C. (Sorry, this is going to get a bit David Foster Wallace here.)

I never said he licked my asshole stated by subject A implies either subject B or C has assumed subject A's asshole has been licked and possibly reported this to (a) further subject(s) C, with this having been reported back to subject A. I never said he licked my asshole implies that subject B has reported this potential case of asshole licking to subject(s) C and it has got back to subject A who strenuously denies to subject(s) B and/or C that such a statement had ever been made. I never said he licked my asshole implies that subject A has subtly eluded to potential asshole licking to subject B who has put two and two together and assumed asshole licking has indeed taken place, and potentially reported this to subject(s) C. I never said he licked my asshole implies that subject A has indeed had their asshole licked by A.N.other and mentioned this to subject B, but subject B has mistakenly identified said asshole licker to be someone not related to the asshole licking at all. I never said he licked my asshole implies that some action has been taking place in subject A's asshole region which has been reported to subject B, but said action was not a tongue based activity. I never said he licked my asshole indicates that subject A has reported asshole licking as an activity undertaken by A.N.other performed upon A.N. Other to subject B, who may have assumed (as many of us naturally do) that when subject A was talking about A.N.other's asshole licking activities, that they were actually referring to themselves when indeed subject A was genuinely talking about A.N.other. I never said he licked my asshole not only indicates that subject A has had another part of their anatomy licked and reported this to either subjects B or C, but that subject(s) B and/or C may have reported this to either subject B and/or other subject(s) C who have mistakenly assumed that it was the asshole, not another part of the anatomy that had been licked.

Right, now we've got that out of the way, I'll try and not be quite so linguistically anal. (Boom boom). I have no idea whether the above differentiations are possible to communicate in Chinese, and I'm not going to pretend I can. But it shows the huge confusion and misunderstanding that can arise between native and non-native speakers of tonal and non-tonal languages (and has diverted me nicely for 15 minutes with a plethora of asshole based imagery). However, possibly wonderfully contradicting myself, I also want to talk about how the expectation of what people talk about, the social niceties that are part and parcel of being human and living in a (globalized- I can't speak for third world countries as I've never been to any), world where we are god-damn well forced to get on with other on a day-to-day basis means that we can still communicate our general meaning as we recognise the basic universalities (I hate that word, but its apt), of human need and want.

I did A-level French and German, and on a three month trip to South America I picked up a smattering of Spanish, (mostly due to an enforced hospitalisation with a nasty ear infection when I had no option but to sit with a Spanish dictionary and conjugate my verbs in order to find out whether I was seriously ill or not. I was- but I'm fine now so please don't worry yourselves about it). I have quite a good ear, and so by the time I left South America my Spanish was at a pretty decent level (although, due to the fact I was a tourist it was, of course, most concerned with how to ask for ice cream, a double room with a shower and how much the boat trip to Lake Titicaca was).Well, I say I could have halfway decent conversations with people, actually what I really mean is that when people talked to me, I could understand pretty much everything that they were saying, not even getting the gist but actually understanding. The only problem was that I couldn't really reply as my grammar was incredibly weak, though my vocab was strong. Yet I never had a problem in communicating with people, because if I could communicate the basics of what I needed or wanted, my conversant would fill in the gaps as they knew what I should/would be saying due to their own experiences.

When I was on this round the world trip, I went with someone who was my boyfriend at the time (who, I hasten to add, didn't pick up any languages at all, meaning I had to do all the talking. All of it. For the whole trip. Not that I'm bitter). His friend Nick (who was Cantonese but who he'd met at university in England), lived in the New Territories in Hong Kong, and one day when we stayed with him we took the train to China for a day. Many of HKs residents do this, to buy cheap goods, eat Szechuan food and have massages in the vast massage parlours, generally in my experience, populated by middle aged businessmen (indeed, I was the only woman, let alone Western woman when we went). At the end of the 'pampering' (ouch ouch ouch, call that pampering?) experience, we all went into a room together to have our final neck massages. There were three Chinese girls massaging us, and Nick struck up a conversation with his masseuse. Despite never having spoken a Chinese language, I understood what was being said between them. He started off by asking her name, then she replied and asked him his. He answered with his Cantonese name, (like many Oriental students studying in England, he'd adopted a Western name which we knew him by). She asked him what he did, he replied that he was an interior architect and that he often came to China because he used factories there as it was cheaper. I lost it after that, but after we came out, I relayed what I had gleaned from the conversation to him. He was pretty freaked out that I'd understood so much, but to me it was perfectly clear that I'd understood it as that is just what people say when they first meet someone. To ta-da! magically interweave my two arguments, despite the fact it was a tonal language, something I, as a Westerner would more than likely find difficult if I decided to try and study it, I understood what was being said through understanding social decorum and interaction. Small talk, it seems, is universal.

What language teaching seems to conspicuously miss out in my experience, is the importance of non-verbal language in understanding what people are saying to you. Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't learn languages in a sound, grammatically acceptable way (I have been known to be a grammar Nazi in my time- sadly drummed into me but my equally Himmleresque father), but what my time abroad has taught me is that smiling, being enthusiastic, using your hands, pictures, gestures, being able to read people's body language is just as important as being able to conjugate je suis, tu as, il a, elle a, nous sommes, vouz ettes, ils sont, elles sont.

I love the differences between languages. Love love love them. I love the fact that in German the word for pillowcase is Kopfkissenbezug, which literally means a cover which kisses the head. How wonderful a word is that? Translating it simply to the word pillowcase completely loses the softness, the gentle imagery that most people wouldn't associate with a structured, ordered language such as German. I've often been jealous of Germans as they can, to an extent, make up nouns; as compound nouns (those with several words stuck together) are an accepted linguistic form e.g. Kopf = head, kissen = to kiss, Bezug = cover.

In essence, not to get all Derridean on you, to me languages are essentially untranslatable, and to speak or understand one requires an almost entirely different mindset in order to be able to truly understand their meaning. (Oops, I've broken my cardinal rule- never use the words 'universality' or 'truth', having been thoroughly academically indoctrinated with Post-Structuralist literary theory. But, fuck it.) The best thing about languages, I find, is the way they subtly change me. I adore the fact that when I speak Spanish I automatically seem to adopt the Spanish 'errrmmmm' when I'm not sure what I'm saying, which seems to be peculiar to them. I love that when I speak French I feel more louche, more 'bof' about everything, and I instinctively crave a cigarette to make my voice hoarser and more sexy. I relish the fact that when I speak German I feel regulated and disciplined, I can anticipate how I'm going to finish a sentence as I have to know where it's going so I can correctly use the modal verb. Languages should invoke these kind of feelings. That's the fun, if you truly feel a language, you can always fumble your way through, relying to an extent on the patience and intuition of whomever you are attempting to speak to.

I've been meaning to read Pinker for ages and I haven't. So if I've said anything related to his work, sorry Stephen, but these thoughts are MINE MINE MINE.

I hope this all made sense. If not, be reassured that if I were saying it aloud to you, it would.