The Creative Beauty of Language
I’ve always found the first few words of the Bible intriguing, “In the beginning God created….” The first picture of God is one of him creating something out of nothing. It’s not surprising then that when he made us in his image he designed us to be creative.
Language expresses the beauty of our creative side. In human nature and our very bodies God has provided the very building blocks from which we create language.
Consider emotion. Language can provoke powerful emotive responses. Mere words? It’s no wonder Solomon the wise king once said, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” Proverbs 18:21. Language enables us to encode emotional meaning in a spark which when transmitted to another can light a fire of inspiration or set off a destructive explosion. In this sense language can create emotion. Language is creative and powerful.
The amazing diversity of sounds we use in creating language is another dimension of the beauty of language. From the tonal subtleties of Chinese and Navajo, and the guttural complexities of Arabic, to the intricate ‘clicking’ sounds of Xhosa (African), language gives unique expression to the human soul that reflects its origin in the godhead itself.
Language uses a different canvas; it employs other media than does the painter or sculptor. Its product, though, is exquisite, interpretive, and can pierce the soul quickly and surprisingly.
August 15th, 2006 at 10:15 am
Great post! One of the things that amazes me about language is that not only does it “use a different canvas” than other media, but it is also what we use to describe everything else that we create. How can you describe a painting or a song or architecture without using language? Even in our minds, when we don’t share anything with anyone else, we are still creating, through language, the stories of how things in our lives are affecting us. I think language is one of the most basic, yet powerful creative tools God has given us.
August 25th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
words move the nations
words uncover the heart
words build a friendship
words define how we see
words cannot last
words reinvent
words lead us to the heart of God
words can heal the soul
words can be a bludgeon
words can set us free fron a dungeon
let us paint the Kingdom into every heart with words
September 26th, 2006 at 10:23 am
I had a wonderful conversation with a stranger about the beauty of language the other day. He was an American living in Germany, back for a brief visit, and he happened to stop into the spice store where I work. We spoke German together, and talked about the inability to translate any language completely. Words in any language have history which colors their meaning. This is most evident to me in very old languages, like Chinese. Modern English is only a few centuries old, (think of how difficult it is to read Chaucer), as opposed to Chinese, milennia old, with a rich cultural history of literature and poetry. A phrase you choose might have been used in a poem hundreds of years ago, and that poem places it in a context. When your reader reads it, it also pulls along with it the some of the context of that poem. And that poet centuries ago might have done the same thing, refering to an older poem, so that any word might have a whole chain of literature strung out behind it for thousands of years. You could use one phrase for “falling leaves” which feels bright and beautiful, or another which feels hopeless and tragic. You can translate facts, but not the “color” of the emotion and history behind the words. I think this is one thing which ties cultures together. Eddie talked about the big Russaian stranger melting into his arms in response to Eddie’s reading a Russian poem; something untranslatable about the soul and history of a people is captured in their own language.
October 3rd, 2006 at 11:40 pm
Hmm. I am going to have to disagree with you, Libby, on ‘the inability to translate any language completely’, and to do so on the grounds of the very thing to which Amy alludes–the power and scope of language’s inherent capacity for creativity. I will grant the /difficulty/ of translating ideas from one culture to the next, but only as an extension of the difficulty of communicating from one person to the next. If I have an idea to which I want to give expression, to a person who knows me well, shares not only language and culture, but personal history and relationship, it may take me only a few words–perhaps not even any. But the less we share–again, working outward from personal relationship, experience, culture, even to language–the harder it will be: more words, more time, and more effort will be required to ’say’ the same thing communicated in a glance or a nod to the one close to me. But we’ve one thing in common that cannot be removed: we are human. I may not be able to translate grief to my dog (though I had one who knew it in his way), but I can to /any/ person, regardless of his or her experiences which may be fundamentally different. One language may not share equally efficient abilities to convey certain realities (we’ve all heard the Eskimo’s multiple words for snow), but given that all human experience is received and processed through God-given psyches–common cortexes, synapses and nervous systems and down (and up) to the most fundamental attributes that make us human (as opposed to apes, dogs or algae)–any person of any language has the capacity to understand the experiences of any other person–if their language can carry it and they have the will and patience to try. But even if we take our crude and clumsy five hundred year old mutt of a language and consider the wealth of ideas and expressions and emotions that have been given form through it–through 26 letters and for most people no more than a thousand words –it seems nothing short of a miracle. Language is up to the task!
Where all languages are not equal–and this is perhaps at the heart of your experience–is in the ability to allow immediate knowledge. And here visual art comes in to play, for certainly the medium of paint can give form to deep and profound truths, subjectively speaking, that words–in any language…can. If I do not know a language, I cannot share in the immediacy of a communication–be it a poem a speech or a southern Californian surfer speaking a slang about surf that I do not know (the surf or the slang). A Russian stranger melts into Eddie’s arms at the reading of a Russian poem because the immediacy of that poem–and yes, certainly specific personal histories and experiences of which even Eddie was unaware, resonate on a personally existential level that a clumsy translation does not translate. But is his an experience that could not be ‘translated’, because to be Russian, and Russian-speaking is qualitatively unique in human experience? In particulars yes, and certainly the effort to explain it will lead to the immediacy becoming lost in translation. But are we really willing to concede–and is it reasonable to do so–understanding of one another–or the prophets or the gospel writers for that matter, not to mention people of different histories, cultures, and experiences? I am not. Language, with patience and effort, can be translated. We should eschew ‘word-for-word’ translations, to be sure, and I for one would welcome a Bible translation that acknowledged that verbal ‘accuracy’ is useless to translating the content of the message. The creative beauty of words, coming full circle, is that in all their finite earthy aural accoutrements, they can, to reference Gadamer, fuse limitless horizons. Truly a gift fit only for those made in the image of God. (And oh how I also squander the gift…)