I have turned into that bloody post-Freudian feminist American theorist, Jane whatsername, who sticks in my memory and wo´‘t leave for the offence of arguing that Roland Barthes can be deconstructed to mean Roll and Bar the S or turn and deconstruct the signifier. I always hated the fact that she thought she could extract meaning from a name in one language that the guy didn’t even choose and analyse it in an entirely different language.
Anyhow, I have become amused in my musing about the loss of the word “I” in Spanish (you just use a singular first person version of the verb, so “tengo” is “I have” and “hablo” is “I speak”). My amusement is due to a pronunciation coincidence: to say “There isn’t any” in Spanish you say “No hay” which just happens to be pronounced “No I”. I’ve also been pondering how I feel about the additional nuances afforded by the language: the issues of gender – all nouns have a gender and all adjectives have a gendered form to match — and class/familiarity – there are four ways to say “you” – singluar familiar, singular formal, plural familiar, plural formal.
I’d love to know what some of you think of all this, especially the writers among you…
more musings to come when I have more cash… and that’s another story!