22 feb 2011

Philosophy in Italian

I believe in reading in languages I don't fully understand. It stretches the brain a bit. Italian is perfect, since I understand it well enough to understand more or less what's going on, but not enough so that I can relax my concentration. Contrary to what might think, the more abstract and conceptual the subject-matter, the easier it is to understand: "Se la filosofia di un popolo è l'incarnazione del suo modo de essere, non c'è dubbio che la mistica ortodossa è l'essenza ed el vertice dell'anima castigliana..." The hardest texts are those with names of a lot of bird species and everyday household objects. Philosophy is easy, botany is hard (from the linguistic point of view).

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