Trilingual Quotes

Some of the aunties in Dial A for Aunties speak the sort of broken English that my parents’ generation does. Their grasp of the English language is not a reflection of their intelligence, but a reflection of the sacrifice that they have made for us. They are, in essence, trilingual, and I am so proud of this heritage.

Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—English, Russian and French—than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several—Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orezy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke—have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned.

Un homme qui parle trois langues est trilingue. Un homme qui parle deux langues est bilingue. Un homme qui ne parle qu'une langue est anglais

If you speak three languages you're trilingual. If you speak two languages you're bilingual. If you speak the language of the opposite sex, you can communicate.

If I ever have kids, this is what I'm going to do with them: I am going to give birth to them on foreign soil—preferably the soil of someplace like Oostende or Antwerp—destinations that have the allure of being obscure, freezing, and impossibly cultured. These are places in which people are casually trilingual and everyone knows how to make good coffee and gourmet dinners at home without having to shop for specific ingredients. Everyone has hip European sneakers that effortlessly look like the exact pair you've been searching for your whole life. Everything is sweetened with honey and even the generic-brand Q-tips are aesthetically packaged. People die from old age or crimes of passion or because they fall off glaciers. All the woman are either thin, thin and happy, fat and happy, or thin and miserable in a glamorous way. Somehow none of their Italian heels get caught in the fifteenth-century cobblestone. Ever.

Bilingualism and diglossia are different. Bilingualism is about two languages you know having essentially the same functions, such that it is easy to translate from one to the other. Simultaneous translators are bilingual, or even trilingual as the United Nations requires, because they need to be able to say exactly the same things in their different languages. With diglossia, however, what you find is a child first learning one language and speaking it at home, and then later on, maybe at school, transiting to another language which is used for less basic things. The end result is not two separate languages that exist in parallel, but a single competence, where ground-level things are done in the first language and things to do with school, or the modern sector, in another. And since each of these languages is bound to its context, translation is not easy.

Begitu mudahnya orang dewasa menyimpulkan, menafsirkan, menilai, menghakimi, menamai, aku sering iri, katanya dengan mencibir, dan menyebutnya: mengetahui!

I look over at Satan’s Cat in the corner, and of course she starts it again. She widens her eyes. I sigh loudly, but not enough to deter her. Another staring contest. This is probably somewhere around our fifteenth in two days. It goes like this. Satan’s Cat stares into my eyes. I stare into Satan’s Cat’s eyes. After a few minutes I get freaked out and jump off the couch, usually screaming the same string of trilingual curse words as before because she has the most terrifying eyes in the world. They’re amber with long black flecks in them that look like slivers, and I swear after about thirty seconds they start spinning like pinwheels and she’s actually grinning at me the whole time—EVEN THOUGH CATS CAN’T GRIN!—probably because she knows she’s stretching her evil out and into my brain. Demonic ocular poisoning. I’d Google it if I weren’t so afraid of what I’d see. Whatever. Maybe this time I’ll win.

To be sure, the would-be decipherers did have one advantage. Long before Botta and Layard had begun their excavations, a limited number of inscriptions of one sort or another had found their way to Europe, especially from Babylonian ruins, and the writing on them had been recognized as resembling Niebuhr's third class on the Persepolis trilinguals. But unfortunately this third class, which could be reasonably assumed to be a translation of the first class, defied all efforts at decipherment. In the first place, the Persepolis inscriptions were far too brief for any insight into the language. Moreover, even a superficial analysis of the then extant Babylonian inscriptions revealed that they consisted of hundreds of signs, while the first class of the trilingual had only forty-two characters, which made it impossible to mark off the names or words that might be expected to be identical. Finally, within the Babylonian documents themselves the very same signs seemed to show considerable variation in shape and form. No wonder, then, that the first attempts at the decipherment of the Babylonian writing proved to be futile.

Why? You didn’t kill him. So tell me about you. Where are you from? What’s with the accent? You look like a black guy, no offense.” “I am a black guy. No offense,” he retorted but seemed a little thrown off in the way his eyes narrowed on her in a dissecting manner. Gaby was aware she had been sharp with her words to his condolences. She wondered if she offended him, or surprised him. A man like Power was probably used to women creaming at his slightest display of affection. “My father and his family are Belizean. I was born and raised in Belize. I lived there until I was 19-years-old. My mother is…was… a black American. My father, Belizean, yes. Still, I’m a black man.” “So Belizeans aren’t considered Hispanic?” Gaby questioned with a crinkled brow. “Belizeans, like most Central and South American inhabitants, are descendants of African slaves that were just dropped off along the way. But we were the only British colony in the region, the only Central American country where English is still the official language, although most Belizeans are trilingual, Elizabeth The Second’s the queen, the whole nine. But we’re of black ancestry even with Hispanic heritage. I see darker tones in my country than yours. Nicaraguans, Puerto Ricans, Brazilians, Costa Ricans, Columbians… most of them have more black blood than the black people in the U.S. That’s why it kills me when people ask shit like that. I mean…” He stopped short. “… not you,” he offered up but Gaby only pressed her lips together feeling slightly embarrassed knowing she was in fact, amongst the ignorant.

Georg Grotefend began systematically translating the trilingual Persian inscription of Darius the Great on the Behistun Rock, which included a version in Babylonian cuneiform.

For example, suppose you are seeking a job as a retail manager. You might bring added value by being fluent in English, Spanish, and French. Being trilingual may not be part of the job description but can be a valuable asset when working with diverse employees and customers who speak Spanish and French. This Value-Added message may tip the scale in your favor. Possibly you are seeking a job as a fifth grade teacher. If you are an expert in computers and computer programming, these skills may not be part of the job description but might be perceived as having high value to an academic institution. If you are an expert electrician, but you are also highly skilled in sales, this added value of contributing to new business development efforts might be the differentiator, the added skill that will help you land a job quickly in tough markets.

With Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson emerged as the preeminent American authority on Black intellectual inferiority. This status would persist over the next fifty years. Jefferson did not mention the innumerable enslaved Africans who learned to be highly intelligent blacksmiths, shoemakers, bricklayers, coopers, carpenters, engineers, manufacturers, artisans, musicians, farmers, midwives, physicians, overseers, house managers, cooks, and bi- and trilingual translators—all of the workers who made his Virginia plantation and many others almost entirely self-sufficient. Jefferson had to ignore his own advertisements for skilled runaways and the many advertisements from other planters calling for the return of their valuable skilled captives, who were “remarkably smart and sensible,” and “very ingenious at any work.” One wonders whether Jefferson really believed his own words. Did Jefferson really believe Black people were smart in slavery and stupid in freedom?

A man trying to convince me to accept terms I am not interested in: Me: Sir I am trilingual, I speak English, Spanish and I understand sign language. This is a sign that it ain’t gonna work.

In the past, the Egyptian Hieroglyphs and the Cuneiform scripts were deciphered because bilingual and multilingual texts were discovered. The Egyptian Hieroglyphs were understood once the Rosetta stone was found in Egypt by soldier in the army of Napoleon in 1799. The cuneiform too was deciphered once the Behistun trilingual inscriptions were found in western Iran. There have been no corresponding inscriptions found for the Harappan script, yet. Since the seals have also been discovered in Mesopotamia and we know that there were trade relations between the two civilisations, it is likely that there might, one day, turn up a Rosetta stone for the Harappan script.

in the service of the British army in Persia. He began to copy some of the trilinguals, especially the Mount Alvand inscription near Hamadan and the Behistun rock inscription about twenty miles from Kermanshah.

Expulsion is to be considered as proof for identification with German Volkstum in the homeland.”76 In his explanation of the proposal, de Vries argued that neither descent nor language were suitable criteria to determine ethnic belonging, pointing to his own trilingualism. The criterion of culture he dismissed as simply too complex to make it useable for the purpose of this law. The objective criteria would thus only complicate the implementation of section 6. Volkszugehörigkeit, de Vries concluded on an almost postmodern note, should be recognized as the “inalienable human right of a free personality”; hence, “belonging to Volkstum should be the free decision of each individual.”77