> I'm still really not sure what you mean by its being
> one's creature. Do you mean in the sense that you
> actively work with it and form it, pushing it into new
> contexts?
I think that is what I mean. I am thinking especially of sentences that are gramatically correct but that a native person would refuse because they carry social meanings that are not "deemed" appropriate. But such meaning would not be mistakes but conscious manipulations of the language to create "new" relations. Of course monolingual people can also do that. I suppose adolescents do that a lot when they use language to question authority for exemple. But the process is not a conscious one. Like Monsieur Jourdain not being aware that he is doing prose all the time. Once one gets to that level of consciousness, language can become a social engineering _tool_.
> I've studied quite a few foreign languages
> (English being my native language), two of them to the
> point where I could claim to be fluent or very
> competent, and you can certainly see what I think you
> are talking about when one is still at the stage of
> "translating" one's thoughts from the native to the
> "target" language and the effort that can take.
>
> On the other hand I do think that languages do carry a
> certain overarching "structure" and that there are
> some things that are easier to express in some
> languages than others.
I agree. It is trivially easy to express strict up-down relationships in Japanese. At least it is trivial for the upper-side. But the structures involved map existing or rather imagined social structures that are not reproducible in French, as far as I am aware.
Jean-Christophe