Sense and Incomprehensibility

I have to preface this. I have a really strange mind and I swear everything will sort of make sense by the end of this post. Possibly. At least, that's the idea.

So, to get down to brass tacks, when Gerritt said "fuck it" in class today, it got my brain going in Arabic. One of the weirder aspects of my mind is that I always have at least two languages going simultaneously in my head. That's why I sometimes mix up words--well, that and I usually talk too fast. The word for "only" in Arabic is فقط, which is transliterated as "faqaT." It sounds similar-ish so whenever I hear that phrase, my brain tends to go "oh, Arabic" and then it translates back to English because reasons and from "fuck it" I magically get "only." It makes about as much sense to me as I'm sure it does to you all.

Which then sort of but not really leads me to the next place my brain went: what is "it?" And then I realized, since my brain was still thinking in Arabic parallel to English, that there is no word for "it" in Arabic. That is, there are no gender-neutral pronouns in Arabic. In non-linguistics-ese, everything is either a he or a she. There are, for all intents and purposes, no its. For example, a bird is masculine (طائر/TA'ir) but a plane is feminine (طائرة/TA'ira). The words are exactly the same except for the last letter (the circle with the two dots over it, or the lack thereof), which is a feminine marker. So I guess all female birds are actually airplanes. Yeah, I don't know either, and neither do any of the Arabic professors I've ever had. They always just gave me the "are you seriously asking that" look and basically said they don't know so stop asking weird questions. But that's not the point. The point, which I seem to lose track of quickly when it's (!) close to midnight, is that "it" changes from culture to culture. In English, we have an understood antecedent that most people don't generally think about. In Arabic, there's no "it"--just a he or a she, which is functionally the same, but is still philosophically a little different.

And so you can now see my mind's descent into the realm of stuff about 0.2% of the world's population actually cares at all about. Speaking of descents, it occurred to me that the working title of the novel I'm very slowly writing on is Descend, so referential mania is again having a heyday in connection with "Signs and Symbols" and the Frye chapter on ascending/descending and my own writing. So it goes.

That's all. Hopefully it made a little sense, perhaps in a rather abstract way. We shall see in the morning, or in class, or something.