A Thing That Happened Today

Ciao Ciao,

I'm going to get my Venice post up soon, but first I just wanted to tell a quick story today about a weird experience I had in class. The moment was so small and insignificant that you all are probably going to think I'm silly for even posting about it.

Instead of my regular contemporary history class this afternoon we had a special lecture given by Arundhati Virmani, an Indian historian who lectured about a historical atlas of India that she created. Besides being a really cool lecture, it was also given in English, because Virmani is not fluent in Italian. (Fair enough, I say, as her book is in French and she already speaks both English and Hindi fluently) So, as you can probably imagine, our professor gave short summaries of the key points in the lecture in Italian after every few minutes or so. I'm sure the constant switching of languages is what caused this super small and seemingly insignificant event.

Part-way through the lecture I looked down and skimmed the notes I had been taking, which as far as I knew, had been completely in English. Besides my usual trouble spelling words like "exercised" and "ideology" I was pleased with my notes. They seemed pretty good for having attended only Italian lectures for a semester-plus. However, one phrase I wrote stood out to me immediately. It goes something like this:

Ideal representations of India 
       --representing territory nella forma of a woman eg. 

As you've all probably noticed, the phrase I wrote starts out in English with the words "representing territory" then switches to Italian at "nella forma," (meaning "in the form") only to switch right back to English with "of a woman."

Weird, right? My brain just decided to switch to another language right in the middle of a sentence. The weirder part? I didn't even notice until a bit afterward.

This occurrence is actually not that uncommon in the reverse. For example, if I'm in an Italian lecture and I don't know how to spell a word, I'll sometimes write it's English equivalent in my notes. This, however, is much more conscious. My brain recognizes the fact that it can't spell the word in Italian and then I consciously decide to write it in English instead.

It's also not that uncommon when I'm speaking. Here in Bologna, especially amongst my American friends, we speak a lot of Ingltano, (pronounced ing-ull-tah-noh) a made-up language that is mostly English but uses Italian insertions. For example, in Italy people say "boh" to signify "I don't know" and it's usually accompanied by a shrug. I use the word "capito" a lot, which means "I get it," and sometimes I'll say "secondo me" which means "according to me." These words have become so second nature to use (even in English conversations) that I sometimes don't notice when I do it anymore.

I don't really know anything about how the brain works and I'm a believer that it's a part of us that we still have a lot to learn about. I just think sub-conscious occurrences like these are weird and cool so I thought I'd share mine with you.