Logic within Language

I know I wrote earlier about my different languages and how one language might have expressions for things another doesn’t. Now, I feel I have to write a little more about them since it’s not only on the level of words where the culture is reflected:  this time, I’m thinking about the internal logic of each language. I wish I was a linguist so I could have a more scientific understanding of language, but as it is, I can merely note down my personal thoughts and experiences.

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to read a couple of pages by a Finnish person, who mainly writes Finnish and German. I read the text, and her English wasn’t half bad per se but still, quite a few sentences felt off. I spent a good while figuring out, why something that wasn’t grammatically faulty still sounded so wrong. I knew, it wasn’t a question of expressions or choice of word, which were the first things I could think of.

Finally, I caught the core of my unease: the logic of the language was alien. I knew, I think differently in different languages but I had never determined what those differences were. Now that I had to explain to someone else, why five line sentences are not great, I finally had to stop and think about it. The discussion went something like this:

“Your sentence is way too long.”

“But it’s one single thought! All the parts are interrelated, and the relationship between all the details is essential.”

This reminded me a lot of a conversation I had had with my friend in England when I began to write in English again after years of purely Finnish life. At the time, I wrote extremely long sentences. And when my friend suggested splitting them in two, I got frustrated with my logic being broken (and she probably got frustrated, because I refused to chop my sentences in half). Now I realise, how much a couple of years in England has changed my thinking.

I am guilty of long thoughts. A thought, for me, is a chain or web woven between of interrelated concepts. When I write in English, the emphasis is on defining each part: each main component of the whole gets its own sentence. The connection between two concepts might be explained in the next. My internal logic in English resembles building a brick tower. I present one block, put a full stop after it and add the next one in a new sentence.

In Finnish, the logic is different. My sentences are much longer, I refer from one part of the sentence to another depicting the whole thought structure; I do lengthy comparisons between different concepts within the sentence. The logic becomes visible through the way I bind things together, not as much through defining the single blocks. My German isn’t quite as strong as my English but I believe the strands woven into a single sentence can be even lengthier there (with verbs at the end of it all…). No wonder the “English” I was reading felt strange written with this kind of internal logic.

The differences in the logic are not only visible in the sentence structures but also in the way my expressions are structured. In Finnish, I pick a word and add a whole bunch of defining attributes to construct precisely the right meaning. In English, I often have much more “synonyms” to use: words that mean almost the same but with very different tones attached. I have never used a synonym dictionary for writing anything but English, but in English, I love it, because I can express so much in such a succinct way just by choosing my expressions carefully. So, even when constructing expressions, I am in English working with clearly defined blocks of language instead of intricate structural lace.

In my experience, some thoughts are more easily conveyed with the internal logic of one language than the other, and vice versa. They all are equally expressive when used well. I really hope that learning to understand the internal logical and structural differences better will help me to express things with a little more clarity. I’m not sure, whether other people can relate to my exact experiences – but I would definitely be interested to hear, what everyone else’s observations of the internal logic of languages is, so feel free to leave your thought in the comments!