Unconscious bias

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Un petit d’un petit
S’étonne aux Halles;
Un petit d’un petit
Ah! degrés te fallent. Indolent qui ne sort cesse
Indolent qui ne se mène
Qu'importe un petit
Tout gai de Reguennes.

—Luis d’Antin van Rooten, Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames, (1967)

To utter a sentence is to prefer one model of the world; one “narrative” over the infinity of alternatives one could construct. To construe one is to do likewise: the success of the communication such an utterance and construal represents depends on how far the speaker’s and listener’s respective narratives coincide — how far they share the cultural conventions on which the language is founded. To understand a language is to understand the cultural conventions which it represents.

If speaker and listener do not share cultural conventions, the result is usually incoherence: a monolingual English speaker cannot understand a French sentence, and that is that. Not necessarily, though: ask a French speaker to read van Rooten’s poem to an English speaker and watch what happens.