my mom has no etymological imagination. i don't understand it, because when it's chinese characters we're talking about she can tell long complicated stories about their form and meaning like she's telling somebody's family history, but she becomes absolutely unseeing when she's dealing with a western european language, or at least yesterday she was reading a chinese translation of kundera's ignorance on the bus and said to me afterwards she couldn't make head or tail of the second chapter, that the sudden proliferation of a bunch of greek, french and goodness knows what other western languages on the page threw her off, and she had a hard time of it trying to understand what the author is trying to do. and that shocked me because that sort of thing seems obvious to me - and i couldn't really "explain" either, or to say if there was anything to explain, or to make it make any sense at all - least of all in chinese, because i didn't really see that i thought that way in chinese either. perhaps it's because i *feel* chinese words in relation to other chinese words - i use the word "feel" even if that's not an accurate term, because it's not "think" that i mean, nor even "understand", but a kind of intuition perhaps? - but feel english words not in relation to other english words, but in relation to other western languages? i often wonder what it would be like not to have had either language, or not to be so sensitive about them, sensitive intended with all its negative connotations.