Olof’s English is so good that I almost forget sometimes he’s not a native speaker. As I’ve said before, we have English as our family language, and when he was still working at home most of his colleagues were non-Swedish, which meant that nearly all of the phone calls I heard him make over the years were in English. So, strange as it sounds, I don’t hear him use Swedish on even a daily basis. It has actually happened, on occasion, that I’ve heard him speak his own mother tongue when I wasn’t expecting it and I’ve thought without really thinking, “Wow, he speaks really good Swedish.”<\/p>\n
Every now and again, though, something will bring home to me the fact that we don’t share a native language. Most recently it was a lengthy call to a Swedish colleague made from his home office, during which I sat just a few feet away from him, eavesdropping. The conversation itself was largely meaningless–and entirely uninteresting–to me, but throughout the call there was something in his manner that made him seem subtly different from usual. I felt a little twinge, listening to him, and was struck by the uneasy feeling that there’s some fundamental part of him that I really don’t know. Will never<\/i> know. Because, of course, language is more than just shared words; it’s shared history and ideas and world views and entire ways of thinking. The ways in which Americans and Swedes are different from each other go far beyond the words we use and, on some mostly deeply buried level, I know that the twain shall never quite meet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Olof’s English is so good that I almost forget sometimes he’s not a native speaker. As I’ve said before, we have English as our family language, and when he was still working at home most of his colleagues were non-Swedish, which meant that nearly all of the phone calls I heard him make over the… Read More Pondering<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2005"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2079,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2005\/revisions\/2079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}