galaxyrise asked: A question that came to mind the other day: while you were travelling, how much interaction did you have with people without a common language? How did that generally work?
Hmmm. This is a good question and one that warrants dicssion. I see that you’ve asked a follow up one as well, which I’ll answer separately for readers’ sakes.
Given the places I travelled through, relatively infrequently. English is widespread, certaintly, but more importantly it’s widespread in a manner that facillitates travel. There are two ways in which this occurs. The first is that English speakers get jobs where they’re going to need to speak English, so the lady that sells tickets at the train station will probably be semi-fluent but the university educated doctor at the local hospital won’t be.
The second is age. In many countries you’re more likely to order your meal correctly with the 15 year old waitress than the 45 year old with 10 years experience, for pretty obvious reasons. It’s a young person that you’re going to approach on the street for directions, and its probably a young person that will serve you at the bar.
The keyword in all of this is ‘relative’. Interaction with non English speakers was more or less a daily occurence. Taxi drivers, shop assistants, train conductors, etc. Jobs often held by 30+ yos. After a while Sam and I in particular became very well practiced at this type of interaction. In the Romantic/German languages, this was particularly easy. I’d listen to the words and do my best to extract the relevant noun from a common English root and from the context. It’s amazing how well humans can communicate without understanding each other.
In the languages that I had no experience in (Arabic, Turkish, languages of the Balkans, etc.), communication is still surprisingly easy. It’s all about body language and context. The interaction that you normally have in these circumstances finds common ground in a pool of universal conversation structure.
Ie. Buying a bottle of water = Greeting —> Indication of Product —> Price —> Change —> Thanks.
The first and last words are easy enough to learn, or you can stick with English if you want to demonstrate your lack of understanding. The product can be indicated wordlessly, and the price, in worst case scenarious, can be written down. Even haggling can be done this way. Sam and I found ourselves in more than one scenario where we haggled simply by writing down numbers and crossing out ones we found unreasonable.
Of course, all this is on a functionality rather than depth level. It’s difficult to dicuss anything with a foreign speaker if there isn’t already a presupposed structure to the conversation. Convention, here, is key to communication. I wonder what Ionesco would say about that.
