Inverted Speech

November 10, 2005

I was reading about Edward R. Murrow. He had an inverted speech pattern that he picked up from his mother as a child. It's not the kind of thing you think about unless you're a linguist. It means he would say, "This, I like" instead of "I like this."

It's also not something you change about yourself. You live with it. Well, Slovak is a lot like how Edward R. Murrow or maybe Yoda speaks if you translate it directly. They do it in an effort to emphasize the most important parts. "Have it, I (do)." "(The) best, it is." Only they don't say it the way Frank Oz does. It's absolutely nothing to them. Yoda sort of presents his sentences like every word is a little morsel of wisdom. Slovak people say it with much more nonchalance and a certain conviction, like there's no other way to say it. They have no idea there is. It's hard to explain. They just roll through it or even mumble it, which is always nice for me.

I read that Edith Wharton lived all over Europe growing up, and I have such a huge appreciation for how she writes that I get very excited at the prospect of one day developing my writing in similar ways as a result of my exposure to foreign languages and cultures. I just want to include a quote from The Age of Innocence. In describing Mrs. Manson Mingott she says, "The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows." That just cracks me up...