Rishab Week 5: What does "Tesserae" even mean?
“Tesserae” are the small tiles used to build a mosaic.
There is a beautiful quote by writer James Nicoll that describes English not as a neat, organized language, but as one that “follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.”
And quite frankly, I can’t write quite as well as Nicoll, but I’m doing my best with the confusing pathways that make American English
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| from https://blog.mosaicartsupply.com/beginner-mosaic-artwork/ |
If you’ve ever studied art history, read historical fiction, or even seen The Hunger Games, you might have stumbled across the word tesserae. It sounds pretty, but I know that even the most diligent SAT vocab studier doesn’t know what it means at a first glance. It is originally borrowed from Latin and Greek, and refers to the small, individual pieces of stone, glass, or tile used to construct a mosaic.
Its a great word on its own, but it is quite the metaphor about the Language of America.
Look closely at the words we use every day, and you’ll realize how many of them are individual tiles borrowed from other cultures. We eat salsa from while relaxing on the patio (Spanish). We check the pundits (Sanskrit) on the news while eating some sushi (Japanese). Just as thousands of tesserae fit together to make a work of art, thousands of borrowed words fit together to build our American vocabulary.
Linguists refer to these as loanwords, and they reveal a lot about how American culture operates. American English’s reaction to finding a concept, food, or artistic element form another culture which we don’t have an English equivalent for, we simply adopt the foreign term and eventually forget they ever came from anywhere else.
Our language isn’t static, nor is it isolated; it is the living mosaic of American cultural syncretism (AP History word yay!), constantly absorbing the world around it, adding a pop of color to our collective identity.
What is your favorite borrowed word in English that doesn’t quite have a direct translation? Mine would have to be nonchalant, mostly because of how incredibly satisfying it is to say.
Hey Rishab! As an SAT vocab demon myself, I’m not going to lie, I’d probably have no idea what the word meant without any context given to me. Oftentimes while in my AP Spanish class, I often think to myself how unnecessarily complicated the language was made to be. That is until I remember the insane amount of random intricacies and little rules that make the English language, well, not nice to say the least.
ReplyDeleteI think what makes American vocabulary beautiful, like you said, is how it is built upon the various borrowed words from various other cultures across the world. Especially after taking the time to go deeper in my APUSH class, America is one of the only “hubs” of exchanges in language, ideas, foods, religions, and more. English’s so-called “imperfectness” is merely the result of trying to mash and stir all of these styles in an attempt to create a uniform language.
My favorite borrowed word in English that doesn’t quite have a translation would be “cafe.” The moment I try pronouncing this word, either verbally or in my mind, I can almost immediately imagine a warm, comfortable environment in a harsh winter time. I also use this word as a memory clue for remembering the term for the color brown in Spanish!