No excuses can hide the criminal actions of a Nazi fellow-traveller in this admirably objective documentary, suggests MARTIN HALL
I’m a jam doughnut
GORDON PARSONS appreciates a very necessary exploration of the benefit of knowing more than one language
Frontage of the Constitutional Court of South Africa in Johannesburg showing all 11 official languages.
PAUL DONOVAN relishes a fascinating exploration of the leading lights of the Labour right in the 1970s
BEN LUNN alerts us to the creeping return of philanthropy and private patronage, and suggests alternative paths to explore
A novel by Argentinian Jorge Consiglio, a personal dictionary by Uruguayan Ida Vitale, and poetry by Mexican Homero Aridjis
MIK SABIERS savours the first headline solo show of the stalwart of Brighton’s indie-punk outfit Blood Red Shoes
New releases reviewed by IAN SINCLAIR
STEVEN ANDREW is moved beyond words by a historical account of mining in Britain made from the words of the miners themselves
The Power of Language
Viorica Marian, Pelican Books, £22
THE subtitle of this intriguingly informative book reads, Multilingualism, Self and Society. It would be unfortunate if readers were put off by the author’s early definition of multilingualism as “not a fixed construct but a mental state in perpetual flux... constantly changing, based on the information the brain receives continuously from the auditory, visual, tactile, gustatory, vestibular and proprioceptive inputs.”
Viorica Marian, a Romanian professor of psychology and specialist in communication sciences, speaks and has studied a dozen languages. The substance of her argument maintains that those fortunate enough to know and use more than one language, whether born into a multilingual family or through acquiring a language other than their vernacular, are equipped with advantages in understanding and therefore enabled to react to our world far beyond that of simply communicating with foreigners.
Descartes’s “I think therefore I am” has been one of the bedrocks of modern psychology and although Marian recognises that “language does not fully determine thought, it is one of the key factors that... influence how we think and who we are.”
More from this author
GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin
GORDON PARSONS meditates on the appetite of contemporary audiences for the obscene cruelty of Shakespeare’s Roman nightmare
GORDON PARSONS recommends an ideal introduction to the writer who was first to give the English a literary language
GORDON PARSONS welcomes a graphic biography of George Sand, the most popular French novelist in 19th-century Britain
