Language

Why is language important? What is this theme all about?
(subtopics - the development of language, hybrid languages, language as identity, storytelling, oral vs written language)

**__Quotations and Analysis__**
" The americans were able to put a man on the moon because they knew English. The Sinhalese and Tamils whose knowledge of English was poor, thought that the earth was flat." (page just before the table of contents) - This quote, I find, to be the beginning of the English dominance. It seems it has already become a large part of research in countries such as the U.S.A. Research and discoveries are supposidly based on whether you knew the english language well or not. All finds and new discoveries are said in this quote to be posted in English which is why perhaps the Sinhalese still thought the earth was flat. The spread of this dominant language has begun but still has clearly not become a world wide knowledge. This probably has not occured due to the lack of resources for translation in this time era. "The Americans were able to put a man on the moon because they knew English. The Sinhalese and Tamils whose knowledge of English was poor, thought the earth was flat." Douglas Amarasekera, //Ceylon Sunday Times// 29.I.78 - Amarasekera is suggesting that language - a certain language, at that, is power. English is the language of power, knowledge, enlightenment, progress...
 * __﻿__**
 * __﻿__**

**Asian Rumors**
"What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto." (Ondaatje 21) Dreams are also a form of language. It is your mind running and telling you a story about something someone might be nervous/excited about or just something going on in someones life.

"//Asia.// The name was a gasp from a dying mouth. An ancient word that had to be whispered, would never be used as a battle cry. The word sprawled. It had none of the clipped sound of Europe, America, Canada. The vowels took over, slept on the map with the S." (Ondaatje, Pg. 22) - The author is poetic, he notices the subtle sounds which make up a word and emphasizes these in this quote. He personifies the word allowing it to do things such as sprawl, much like Pablo Neruda the author of __The Word__ did. Neruda also believed the word had power and this idea is reflected in what Ondaatje writes.

" When someone else speaks, her eyes glance up to the ceilings of the room, as if noticing the architecture there is for the first time, as if looking for the cue cards for stories." ( Ondaatje, pg, 25)

~Ondaatje explains how someone is talking she is distracted and did not want to listen, she would set her mind on somthing else.

**A Fine Romance**
" If the crowd or the horses did not cause trouble, The Search-light, a magazine published by the notorious Mr.Gomez, did. "one of those scurrilous things". it attacked starters and trainers and owners and providd gossip to be carefully read between races. Nobody wished to appear in it and everyone bought it." (page 33) In the 20's, society is already using written language as a voice to spread conflict and influence the ideas and thoughts of the population. This is showing the coming of communication spreading furthur across the world. I assume that media will come into place rather shortly and potentially warp reality as it is has already begun to.

"I remember the wedding ..." (Ondaatje 36) Memories are a very important for of language. People communicate through memories. Also, if enough time has went by, bit of the memory could be lost...so sometimes memories are not as truthful as they appear.

"After Francis died there was nowhere really to go. What seemed to follow was a rash of marriges. There had been good times 'Women fought each other like polecats over certain men.'" (Ondaatje, Pg.47) - This shows that once the party go-er of the time had died suddenly everyone sobered up. What had been before almost as wild as the stories children from our generation hear about the sixties suddenly came to an end and the women realize they need to get married. The simile of polecats and women really allows you to visualize the agressiveness and backstabbing which the women must have been capable of. Fighting for the best of the men, the first of them to have sobered up as well, truely must have been the exact opposite of the friendly openness of the party time compared to the sudden need/rush to grow up. Stories get passed on through generations with exaggerations and additions this is an example of that.

"If the crowd or the horses did not cause trouble, //The Search Light,// a magazine published by the notorious Me Gomez, did. “One of those scurrilous things,” it attacked starters and trainers and owners and provided gossip to be carefully read between races. Nobody wished to appear in it and everyone bought it. (Ondaatje, 51)﻿ -This expresses language in a different and more pop culture manor. It is using gossip as a form of language that grasps the peoples attention it also shows that language is power, with it you can sway opinions or ruin reputaions. This is an example of a 1920's gossip magazine. It really shows the age considering it is about races. It is also similar to this generation in the way that you may not want to be in it...but everyone wants to read it. It also compares to facebook where language and stories are transferred so everyone can read them, but only in a more sophisticated way. It shows how much the relaying of language has changed over time.

"Truth disappears with history gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships" (Ondaatje 53) -Gossip, stories, legends all eventually turn into history, but as said here they dont actually show the complicated personal relations that go on in life and eventually there are questions on whether or not the accepted history is fully truthful, since it almost all stems from some sort of rumor or story.

"I want to sir down with someone and talk utter directness, want to talk to all the lost history like that deserving lover" (Ondaatje 54) -Directness and forwardness doesnt exist in launguage or history, if they do often they are considere primitive since history twists and turns, it can be lost or rediscovered, but still humans always want the directist route, they dont ant any extra effort but the things they want can be lost in the fold of time and memory.

"I wanted to Learn Latin and he offered to tutor me from four until fiver every morning" (Ondaatje 55) & "Bampa had a weakness for pretending to be "English"... " (Ondaatje 56) -This just shows once again how much the Ondaatje's like to be diverse in languages, as here his great uncle teaches him Latin and Bampa for wanting to be English, it also shows that the Ondaatjes didnt have a specific launguage in thier family theyd lived through so much history and changes in power that diveristy was accepted possibly even prided but this may have stemmed from mimicry.

"Even the shy Lyn Ludowyck betrayed his studies and came out there once, turning out to be a superb mimic, singing both male and female parts from Italian operas which the others had never heard of - so they all thought at first that he was singing a Sinhalese baila." (Ondaatje, 46) -This quote shows how if people aren't told what language something is in, they can mistake it for a completly different language altogether.

"His quiet life in Kegalle was interuppted, however, when Doris Gratiaen wrote to break off the engagement. There were no phones, so it meant a drive to Colombo to discover what was wrong. " ( Ondaatje, 35) ~ this quote from Running in the Family shows how it was hard to communicate, and people had to physical find the people they wanted to talk with. Communication was not easy for people, it took a longer period of time to say what you wanted to say to someone.

Don't Talk to Me About Matisse
"A new name which was a Dutch spelling of his own. Ondaatje. A parody of the ruling language." (Ondaatje 64) -This shows some history of Michael's ancestry as his family name has changed to be spelled in Dutch, also a "parody" a mock up of the language, mimicry and language combined in one, the diverstiy had become accepted in the country but everyne stll tries to fit in by altering thier languge and spellting to fit bettter those of the ruling people

“The maps reveal rumors of topography, the routes for invasion and trade, and the dark mad mind of travelers’ tales appears through-out Arab and Chinese and medieval records. The island seduced all of Europe. The Portuguese. The Dutch. The English. And so its name changed, as well as its shape- Serendip, Ratnapida (“island of gems”), Taprobane, Zeloan, Zeilan, Seyllan, Ceilon, and Ceylon – the wife of many marriages, courted by invaders who stepped ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword or bible or language.” (Ondaatje, 64) -This quote is in the middle of a paragraph that explains the history and naming of Ceylon. It also briefly mentions its history and its mapping which are all various forms of language. It shows how languages change with time just as history does. Language, places and history all affect one another, without one the other would not be able to exisit and so each chages as the other does.

"To kneel on the floors of a church built in 1650 and see your name chiseled in large letters so that it stretches from your fingertips to you elbow in some strange way removes vanity, eliminates the personal. It makes your own story a lyric. So the sound which came immediately out of my mouth as I half-gasped and called my sister spoke all that excitement of smallness, of being overpowered by stone" (Ondaatje 65-66) -This shows in a new way how the written form of a word, such as a name, has importance. As the name is chiseled into the stone of the church I no-longer seems to be a Personal name, but something more important and more beautiful, it is history. Language can be expressed in so many different ways. Someone else's expression of language can be passed on to someone else to read years later. The person who chiseled the large letter into the floor probably never thought that their expression of language would have such an affect on another individual years later.

"Driven through rainstorms that flood the streets for an hour and suddenly evaporate, where sweat falls in the path of this ballpoint, where the jak fruit rolls across your feet I the back of the jeep, where there are eighteen ways of describing the smell of a durian, where bullocks hold up traffic and steam after the rain". (Ondaatje, 69) -This section uses language to describe a flood, its using informal writing and describing the though process of how the narrator sees a street that is flooded. It also explains that the language in Ceylon is a lot more descriptive than the English that is used in the book and so commonly throughout the world.

"...and the man sleeping on the street who objected when I woke him each of us were speaking different languages" (Ondaatje 70) -When trying to communicate with someone who speaks another language it is often difficult and hand gestures are sometimes ineffective.

“An aunt of mine remembers his coming to dinner and continually breaking into song, but many of his dark claustrophobic pieces in //Residence on Earth// were written here, poems that saw this landscape governed by a crowded surrealism – full of vegetable oppressiveness.”(Ondaatje 80-81) -this quote shows how much the country is affected my imperialism, how the people are oppressed. As this foreign man breaks into song, even he understands what the country is going through.

"Sanskrit was governed by sharp verticals, but its sharp grid features were not possible in Ceylon. Here the Ola leaves which people wrote on were to brittle. A straight line would cut apart the leaf and s a curling alphabet was derived from its indian cousin" (Ondaatje, Pg.83) - The begining of the Cylon alphabet is interesting, because of the type of material they wrote on they were unable to use straight lines in fear of cutting through the material, meanwhile in places like Rome things like serifs were developed for thier writing because thier main writing material was stone. Thus straight lines and dashes on the end to keep the rock from splitting was practical, so very different from the curling alphabet which was developed in Ceylon and based off the Indain alphabet.

"For years i thought literature was punishment, simply a parade ground. The only freedom writing brought was as the author of rude expressions on the walls and desks." (Ondaatje 84) - Expression is what created the form of language, many dont realize when they are young that literature isnt the only way to convey thoughts, that graffitti one sees plasted on walls and desks really is a sub form of cave art which was the first sort of writen language.

"They answer no one take the hard rock as lover Women like you make men pour their hearts..." (Ondaatje, pg.92) -The use of Ondaatje's poems help to convey meaning and feelings of the characters...

"and with the solitude of the air behind them  carved an alphabet  whose motive was perfect desire  wanting these portraits of women  to speak  and caress." (the communal Poem- Sigiri Graffiti, 5th century) (pg.93) -"The art of the body" many artisits describe it as such, they try to capture in in thier paintings, poems or whatever media they have. Body language is a form of this art, an unwritten language used to comunicate throughout the ages, explained again in one of the poems Ondaatje chose to use within his book.

"When I was five - the only time in my life when my handwriting was meticulous - I sat in the tropical classrooms and learned the letters, repeating them page after page. How to write. The self-portrait of language." (Ondaatje, 83) - This quote is saying that letters define a language. If the letter are symbols, one can assume that the language would be difficult to pronounce because it is a picture,with letter the language would probably be easier to pronounce because each lette has a sound so the person could just sound the word out.

" I still believe the most beautiful alphabet was created by the Sinhalese. The insect of ink curves into a shape thia is almost sickle, spoon, eyelid. The letters are washed blunt glass which betray no jagedness." ( ondaatje, 83) ~ The alphabet is different in every language, and it is very important no matter what language it is in. The alphabet is how we write, speak, and communicate. This quote is describing an alphabet created by the Sinhalese people, it describes what is looks like and what is means.

Eclipse Plumage
"//Who// is Hilden? asks Tory. // I // am Hilden... your host! Oh.  Anyway... there seems to be three different stories that you're telling.  No, //one,// everybody says laughing." (Ondaatje, Pg 108) -This entire chapter (Lunch Conversation) is cut into peices like this, the reader knows it is a dialouge between people but there is no real way of knowing who is speaking, it gives new apricaition to how many of your senses are needed to follow a conversation and used in language, within a book there is normally a way to know who is speaking because you are told. Ondaatje appears to be making the reader fit together the puzzle just as he had to figure out his own family history.

The Lunch conversation chapter is a conversation, the enitre chapter is made up of language and conversation between people. there is diologue but no way of knowing who is saying what and what is really going on.

" wait a minute, wait a minute! when did all this happen, im trying to get it straight...

Your mother was nine, Hilden was there, and your grandmother Lalla and David Grenier and his wife Dickie.

How old was Hilden?

Oh in his early twenties. ( Ondaatje, 105)

"One when your mother was nine. Then when she was sixty-five and drinking at the wedding lunch, and obviously there is a period of unrequited love suffered by the silent Trevor who never stated his love but always fought with anyone he thought was insulting your mother, even if in truth she was simply having a good time with them the way she was with Hilden, When she was sixty-five." (Ondaatje,108) - This quote is saying that if you don't say something that is important you when need to say it, then it might be too late and you'll have to suffer the consequences of not saying what you wanted to.

The Prodigal
" The wild pig has takin it. My wild pig. That repulsively exotic creature in his thick black body and the ridge of non-symetrical hair running down his back. This thing has walked off with my bar of pears Transparent Soap? Why not my copy of Rumi poetry? Or Merwin translations?" (page 125) -This shows that books have little importance at this point in time. That translations have not become necessary and language is still new and broken. It shows that translations are not a main concern and it has little to do with survival. This character feels that a bar of soap is more important than keeping a book of translations on hand.

"One frail memory dragged up ou of the past- going to the harbour to say goodbye to a sister or a mother, dusk. For years I loved the song, "Harbour Lights," and later in my teens danced disgracefully with girls, humming "Sea of Heartbreak." (Ondaatje, Pg. 133) -Music is a very common form of oral language, it allows for emotions to be better expressed, memores to be explained and everyone can relate to a human voice. Music can also harbour memories just as Ondaatje says that a specific place reminds him or a specific song and vice versa.Music is highly important when it comes to language. Sometimes music is the only way a human feels comfortable expressing themselves, music can show a lot about someone and it is also the easiest way to connect with a human being that could possibly be the complete opposite of you.

"...everyone is laughing and Gillian is no doubt exaggerating Yasmine's account..." (Ondaatje Pg. 138) -This is a great example of how language gets altered as it is passed around. Some people exaggerate, some miss communicate, and some spread rumors. You can never tell whether you are getting the truthful and full story when you are only getting one side of it. "I am dreaming and wondering why this was never to be traumatically remembered. It is the kind of event that should have surfaced as the first chapter of an anguished autobiographical novel." (Ondaatje, Pg. 138) -Ondaatje says here how he cannot remeber the event his siter descibes as told to her by onther, it is a strange chapter but it allos the reader to see that everyone remeers things differently. As one thing my seem vastly important to one friend the other may remember it entirely different and thus through conversations and letter and peoples interactions the outsiders peice togetherr the true story but if they dont and only do with one viewpoint that is when things can become distorted and history can change.

“As if that scrawl was the result of great discipline, as if at the age of thirty or so she has been blasted, forgotten how to write, lost the use of a habitual style and forced herself to cope with a new dark unknown alphabet.” (Ondaatje 150) -When we write it is said that the shape of our letters have a meaning to them. It may show the type of people we are or that we are troubled. When Michael speaks of his mothers writing, he says that it has changed to become much less proper; this “dark unknown alphabet” may mean more than just lazy writing. Perhaps she too was troubled just as her husband.

"My mother, clutching a suit of civillian clothes (the Army would not allow her to advertise his militar connections), walked into that darkness, finding his andtalking with him for over an hour and a half." (Ondaatje, Pg.149) - Whispers and rumours often distort history, as explained in connection to earlier qoutes, ut they often cary some wieght of truth to them. Where Ondaatje came from honour is a prized thing thus the Army probably really didnt want someone disgracing them whilst wearing military atire but as this is only a whisper, there was never an oficail statement of this then the audience or the ones to hear this story through someone else has to decide if they belive that the Army really didnt want to send out clothes or wether Ondaatjes mother just happened to have only civillian clothes with her.

"Photograph" //"What we think of married life"// (Ondaatje, Pg.162) //-// That is what was written on the back of Micheal's Parents wedding photo. It shows that language is also in photography because his parents can communicate their love through a picture, and it also allows the rest of the world to see how they loved each other. Its also a sort of pun, with the words "What we think..." clearly the two were together and two of a kind expressing thier indevidualtity with a photo and a short sentence yet this is the nly photo Ondaatje has seen of his parents so you wonder if this is also just a facade as written or visual lanugage cannot wholey express emotions or feelings for that you also need body language which the cuple manipulate in this photo

"From Anuradhapura we drive towards the Wilpattu Jungle, through the small town of Nochiyagama. 'That's it,' I tell my daughter 'that'll be a good name for a child of yours.' //Nochi.//" (Ondaatje,140) - This quote is saying that if a place has a sentilmental value to someone, like what Ceylon has to Ondaatje, some people name their children after them to remember the places.

What We Think About Married Life
"My father loved books and so did my mother, but my father swllowed the heart of books and kept that knowledge and emotion to himself. My mother read her favourite poems out loud, would make us read plays together and acted herself, even running a small dance and theatre school that people still remember in Colombo. Her reading out loud demanded the whole room, and while young her grace and dancing caught everyone's attention." (Page 168-169) -This quote shows that everyone has different methods of expressing their knowledge and everyone learns in different ways. Some people are educated independantly and others learn from visualizing it.

"She belonged to a type of Ceylonese family whose women would take the minutest reaction from another and blow it up into a tremendously exciting tale, then later use it as an example of someone's strain of character. If anything kept their generation alive it was this recording of exaggeration.' (Page 169) -I find that this quote has great significance because really how would generations remain alive if it wasn't for the recording of exaggeration. Language and stories pass on and on through generations, but do they really remain the same story? Do we not add a bit of exaggeration each time? Not lies, but exaggeration keep the language and the story exciting. "(vi) I dont know when this happened or how old I was. I was lying on a bed. It was night. The room was being thrown around and they were shouting. Like giants." (Ondaatje, Pg.176) - Memories are a form of language, Ondaatje, in the chapter Dialouges, lists small qoutes of what people remember of his parents, it creates a progression of thier marriage and life as viewed by others. A few remeber his father as being wonderful and kind, others remebers yelling and fighting or the stories from his mother but they all fit together to give the reader a god timeline or progression through thier lives all through language and memories... oral language turned to written language.

Words such as //love, passion, duty,// are so contunally used they grow to have no meaning - except as coins or weapons. Hard language softens. (Ondaatje 179) -This is my favourate quote from the novel. For one I find it to be very true in out culture, we use such "important" words so loosely and foul words we use so regularly. People try to convince each other of thier honesty using words such as "I love you" and you quicly believ them s you assume tht to be an important word and yet you hear it jokingly amungst friends or when someone says "I hate you" noone actually believes them yet "hate" is supposed the be a stong word and so our language and culture gets watered down and people lose the meanings of things.This quote shows the significance of language to emotions. It communicates how powerful words have become. It can have a large effect on your thoughts and feelings but if used to much can start to lose it's effect. It tells how powerful language can start to be used as a weapon or a persuasive argument. These words can have you feel as though you have everything you need but also can have you feel trapped and woven into a web you can not get out of.

The Cylon Catus and Succulent Society
He knelt down on the red tile, slowly, not wishing to disturb thier work. It was page //189.// He had not got that far in the book yet but he surrendered it to them. (Ondaatje 189) - The irony in this quote is interesting, I noticed it right away because it says the ants carried away Page 189 and the page Ondaatje printed this on was actually page 189. It allows you to apriciate the fact that if suddenly the rest of the book was gone you would never be able to finish it, you could never tell how it ends. Wether this is a clever connection to Michael Ondaatje wondering if he can ever really finish his own story, or if this is Mervyn trying to understand his own story or just the fact the reader is to apricaite that without the last pages of a book youll always be left unsatisfied is for you to decide.

"My body must remember everything, this brief insect bite, smell of wet fruit, the slow snail light, rain, rain, and underneath the hint of colours a sound of furious wet birds whose range of mimicry includes what one imagines to be large beasts, trains, burning electricity." (Ondaatje Pg. 202) - Even if Ondaatje writes all his memories down he realized through his journey that paper can dissapear, memories can fade and really the only thing that can remeber the stories and things he saw is his body. Years in the future he'll suddenly rember the smell on a dinner, the feeling of excitement when he saw a family member the sound of rain on the tin roof. Such things dnt dissapear nomatter the changes that go throughout in his life.

Acknowledgments
"A literary work is a communal act. And this book could not have been //imagined//, let alone conceived, without the help of many people." (Ondaatje, pg. 205) - "Communal" means it is shared with everyone and that is really what literature is, its written to preserve throghts, memories, stories and history which can be shared amungst people for as long as they are interested. Language is also one of those things which wouldnt exist if lots of people didnt use it, its what keeps it moving and changing over time. Without people to speak it, it becomes a dead language.

"And if those listed above disapprove of the fictional air I apologize and can only say that in Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts." (Ondaatje, pg. 206) - I found this to be an interesting qoute, made me wonder about the whole book and how much was truth and how much got changed around with his own thoughts, but it seems quite true. Throughout the book Ondaatje keeps saying how the people he spoke to wuld spend hours telling the sme story and it would keep changing wth perspectives and things theyd say happened since a well told lie always has a grain of truth to it.

"You must get this book right," my brother tells me, "You can only write it once. But the book again is incomplete." I think this is a true statement and explains something about our perceptions of language. You only have one chance to get something right. By saying the book is incomplete shows that we can never know something or someone completely. There's always something new or something that can be shown in a different light. It keeps our curiosity alive and to quote someone famous, "Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect." "Whatever country I was living in...there's always another point of view. There's another kind of version of things that goes on...'Never again will a single story be told as if it were the only one.'" I felt this passage described Running in the Family. Throughout the whole novel deals with this idea of storytelling. Every individual sees important aspects of a certain story that he or she focuses on. Also each person has bias that can effect the telling of his or her story. No two people can narrate a story exactly the same, especially if it is passed down through generations. Even though Ondaatje was not specifically discussing Running in the Family.