This is an aside titled 'Language Lovers Don’t Necessarily Love Talking to Other People' dated 8/25/08
“I think there are people who like languages who don’t necessarily want to communicate with other people, they just like the medium. I have a feeling I’m like that most of the time. I like languages for their grammatical idiosyncrasies – when I come across a rare verb form in Arabic it makes me laugh out loud. I like the different ways they sound, the way Slavic languages are chewy, the way Spanish and Scots use rolled r’s for a sort of verbal pinball, the way Danish has a sort of archipelago of half-submerged consonants. This is not obviously a recipe for world peace… Part of the attraction of a different language, though, is that the mind, immersed in this new medium, finds the possibility of a different self. When people do ugly things they don’t use a separate language for them – so the words we use every day, ‘if’, ‘and’, ‘the’, ‘but’, ‘you’, bring back memories of that ugliness. If you escape into a different language you leave all those ordinary words behind; the words of the new language are innocent, harmless, have no history.” – Helen DeWitt (via.)
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