Inspired by RF Kuang's substack essay about her new book Taipei Story and a number of works of literature which inspired and informed her own work.

Helsinki 2025, source: me

As an American living in France back in 2015, I was ordering at a café with my visiting mother and her friend. As I took a sip of water, I was asked by the waiter in French,

«Et votre parents anglais, qu'est-ce qu'ils voudraient?»

The waiter had mistaken me for a native speaker and my American mother and her friend as my “English relatives.” I relayed this, and we all had a good laugh about it.

But lest I get too haughty, on the same trip I had gone into a book shop to search for a Tintin book as a gift for my mother, asking the shop clerk,

«Est-ce que vous avez des livres de Tintin?»

I pronounced the name the way it looks phonetically in English, but with a French accent, something like “teen-teen.” The shop clerk looked baffled, and after several more attempts I simply showed him one such book on my phone.

Tintin books, source Paris-BD.com

He fully laughed in my face in that French way I had previously thought was just a stereotype,

«Tintin! Oui Bien sûr. Hehe...‹tine-tine!›»

I had forgotten that, with several notable exceptions, “-in” word endings in French are pronounced with their most intense nasal sound, closer to the English “tan-tan.” Isn't language fun?

On a related note, I have been especially enjoying…

Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue by Yoko Tawada

Tawada, a Japanese writer who writes in both her native tongue and in German, does beautiful work analyzing the ways in which being a non-native speaker forces you to dig into aspects of language which are difficult to see if you’ve grown up with them: the reason French has different words for a river that flows to the sea («fleuve») and that flows into another river or lake («rivière»), the differences in grammatical construction that rewire your brain to start a sentence somewhere cognitively foreign. Ah yes, how it enriches the human experience!

I highly recommend Tawada’s work if you are multi-lingual or have an interest in the way in which language shapes thought, and in particular those exciting spaces which open up between the untranslatable (which, it so happens is also the basis of the magic system in RF Kuang’s Babel or The Necessity of Violence).

#Babel #RFKuang #books #bookreview #france #travel #language #linguistics #TaipeiStory #YokoTawada #translation #magic #fantasy #francais #French #France #German #Germany #Japanese #JapaneseLit

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