Anna Wierzbicka Book Review

In the preface of the book, “Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development”, Anna Wierzbicka explains that the people who are bilingual, are facing problems every day, due to the sense of the meaning of an word or a frase. She is focusing on multilingualism and emotions, the things that make harder the meanings of understanding between people. Also, she gives examples from her own life, whice are accurate, and shows very clearly the differences between languages. She was born in Poland but lives in Australia and she shows the differences between some words and expressions in polish which can not be translated or don’t have an equivalent in english. What she is saying in this preface is that every language has it own phrases and words that can not be replaced in other language, or have different meanings. She is saying that vocabulary of emotions is totally different from a language to another. Anna Wierzbicka illustrates this diference by giving examples from her own life, such as a discussion with her daughter and shows that Polish and English concepts does not match.
In my opinion, what Anna Wierzbicka is saying is right because languages …show more content…
She gave an example, also from her life. She says that when she speak with her “Anglophone” friend and she is asking about her granddaughter she get stuck in words. “I just can’t find English words suitable for talking about my tiny granddaughter.” Anna says that she use one word in Polish, which in English means “delightful”, and she can’t use the same word in English because it has no emotional feelings about her granddaughter. In English, people will be “reluctant” when describe their childreen as “delightful” and shows “a lack of personal emotional involvement.” In English, people don’ ussualy talk about their children in an emotional language, describing them as “cute, sweet, dear, adorable, lovely, even