Language, Part III: An idiom analysis

It’s all Greek to me.

It’s what we Americans say when confronted with something that we do not understand.  Most of us here don’t speak Greek but we’re massively influenced by it, just look at our language, art, architecture, politics, I could go on and on… Ha, I’m reminded of this scene from a lovely little indie movie that could: My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

It’s all Chinese to me.

From what I was told, this is the European equivalent to the aforementioned phrase.  Think back to Marco Polo times and the Silk Road that connected the “Orient” to the “West”.  Through this connection Europeans started to season their food (thank God!), use utensils to eat it, learned and adapted different military technologies (guns, fireworks); I don’t know the extent of its impact on language, though.  The “Chinese language” is vastly different from most other languages (maybe hieroglyphics compare? I don’t know, I’m no historian or linguistic expert) because they use characters instead of letters.  And Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese—they’re all different variants on the spoken Chinese languages but to my ear they sound so argumentative and angry, with all their different inflections, where SHirr is different from shuRR and it’s so hard to type out the differences because this English language I am using is not conducive to demonstrating the tricky phonetics of those languages.  Anyway: Europeans were impressed and confused by Chinese and learned a lot from them.

It’s all the language of the gods to me.

Aaand finally this is the equivalent phrase in the Chinese languages.  We Americans look to the Greek, the Greek/Europeans look to the Chinese, and the Chinese look to deities.  I don’t want to infer, per se, that the Chinese are such pompous people that they consider themselves second only to the gods.  Still, there’s something to…consider, when the two other phrases referred to other cultures/countries and this case doesn’t refer to any other nation.  Another read into this phrase might be that the Chinese are humble in admitting that they can’t quite understand what the gods are up to and why they act the way they do.