on language

Watching the world go
By, in seven diff'rent lan-
guages. Blurs of sound.

As you may be aware, English is not spoken everywhere. It's awesome to have a native French speaker on my team for traveling in places like, um, France and French Switzerland. It's amusing how language differs from place to place, though. I recognize it in the States, I guess, with how Southern people are notably southern and people from the UK are clearly not North American, but Mathieu had some more serious dialect/accent issues.

So I was informed that people from France "love Québécois." It seemed true, too; every person we met in Geneva who was from France got excited to talk to him. Every person from French Switzerland, though, thought he was a native English speaker who was butchering French, and they insisted on speaking with him in English, much to his dismay/chagrin/ire.

He and I had a conversation about language, too. What makes one good? He proposes a universal language with a simple construction, no irregulars, and no ambiguity. As a scientist, I guess I see that this is a logical thing to do. It's completely infeasible, but theoretically sound. However, as an ex-aspiring writer, I shudder at the thought of a language I can't play with. I had a minor outburst at his "no ambiguity." It removes the poetry of the language, I said. But what do you need ambiguity for, he asked, other than bad, deceptive things?

Honestly, I didn't know what to answer. What do you think?