by Vincent Guy
Alexander Mikhalchyk - The Tower of Babel
The first language I gave up on was my mother tongue, or rather my mother’s tongue: German. I’m 4 years old riding in the back of a Morris Minor in Britain, my mum in front with her German friend, a fellow refugee. As they chat away, I can follow pretty well. My mum turns round:
“Willst du mit uns ein bisschen Deutsch sprechen?” (Would you
like to speak some German with us?)
“NO! I won’t!” I bark back, probably stamping my foot.
“But why not? You know lots of German.”
“No! It’s Opa!”.
Opa, my German grandfather, who had dandled me on his knee and regaled me with German nursery rhymes, had recently died. Somehow the idea of opening my mouth in his language felt like disrespect. More generally, it’s common for the children of immigrants or mixed parentage to turn their backs on the ‘foreign’ language. Their need to put down local roots is overwhelming. Nearly a decade later I was lucky enough to get an excellent German teacher at my grammar school. I can still recite his lists of prepositions taking the Accusative Case and those taking the Dative. His instruction, along with the background of German chatter between Mother and her visitors, mean I am now at home in the language; far short of bilingual but comfortably fluent.
The French Advanced Level exam sits on my CV as ‘Failed’, though I felt I spoke it better than the teacher, whose accent reeked of Yorkshire ale rather than Château d’Yquem. Under his tuition the set texts remained stiffly set; great time and effort were expended learning complex verb forms and lists of arcane vocabulary. One such included the French for Jerusalem artichoke, though none of us provincial lads had a clue what a Jerusalem artichoke might be. The lists didn’t include more vital items such as le weekend or le parking. Nowadays my command of French is paradoxical, both excellent and pathetic. I’ve happily read quite a few French classics in the original; Baudelaire and Prévert are among my favourite poets. But everyday life?
Once, coming from a weekend with French friends happily exchanging quips about important matters like le structuralisme and l'existentialisme, I found myself at the airport bar unable to get the waiter to grasp my need for “Un café et un Calva” (coffee and Calvados). Perhaps I should have asked for a Jerusalem artichoke. In case you ever find yourself in such a tight corner, it’s un topinambour.
Landing in Lima on a gap year I set about converting my school French into Spanish, assisted by my Peruvian girlfriend. Teaching aids were her skill in Cuban dance and her dazzling beauty, a widespread quality among las limeñas. The following decade went by without any chance to open my mouth in Spanish. An invitation to Portugal came along where I managed to get by, using scraps of my half-forgotten español while imagining my nose was blocked. (The two languages are very close.) Then, crossing the Spanish border over the River Tagus, it was a glorious epiphany to find that, like riding a bicycle, the skill had never gone away. Within 48 hours I could speak it as well as ever, ready to learn more.
Italian? I spent 6 months teaching English in Milan with few opportunities to utter a word in the local lingo, but on return to UK, I found myself with an Italian girlfriend. The words came pouring forth from my mouth, with a little background help from years of watching the films of Pasolini, Fellini, Visconti.
As for Greek… Arriving in Athens some 50 years ago, I remember thinking “This is going to be a walkover.” People kept calling me a good kid, a “Kallo paedi”: words familiar far beyond Greece within the more high-brow terms of calligraphy and paediatrics. I found lots more elements from the scientific or academic lexicon popping up in everyday modern Greek: philanderer and photophobia turn into friend, bloke, light, fear. Microcephaly and megalopolis become little, head, big, town. And a bus stop is simply stasis. Easy. But no, this has not been enough to untangle the language’s other complexities. After a couple of decades visiting the country the combination of my ageing brain and the increasing command of English by all Greeks, from professors to taxi drivers, meant I never got beyond my ragbag of random words. Whenever I open my mouth in Greek everybody laughs and mocks me – in English – for my mistakes.
Once, a quirk of fate took me to Iran. Oddly enough the Persian language, a.k.a. Farsi, is not that difficult. While the script and much abstract vocabulary come from Arabic, the basis is Indo-European – with an apparently simplified grammar. For example, there are no genders or auxiliaries. And the question form? It’s just a statement with an extreme rising tone in the manner of an Aussie Sheila or a Californian Valley Girl. Many everyday words reveal a link to our own: dokhtar is daughter, hal is health, sheesh is six, man is me or mine. By the time I left I could manage small talk (very small) in the village bazaars.
The other day in an Edinburgh café I heard a familiar sound from the next table. A youngish threesome were sitting with an older man whose elegant long face looked somehow familiar. I asked them,“Shoma farsi harf mizaneee? (Are you speaking Persian?)”. Can’t say it all came flooding back but I managed to sing the question out. They were having a lesson, simply for the joy of learning Persian.
Again in Edinburgh, at a Persian New Year celebration, I thought I would give my rusty Farsi an airing and went round saying “Thank you” to everybody. They all beamed. Only when I got home and did a little follow-up on the matter did I realise I’d been saying “Please” all the time. The leaders of Iran may be hard; the Iranian people are gentle and forgiving.
Then there’s Russian. At school I did one term of after-hours classes. These days I’m amazed to find, when watching a Russian film, I can pick out many of the words I learned (ulitsa street, govarit he speaks, rabotayet he works). If we look under the linguistic bonnet we can see some intriguing Indo-European connections. The G sounds are close to H, (the Russians even call Hamlet Gamlet); V and B are close cousins, the Spaniards often mix them up; R is close to L as the Japanese often reveal in their pronunciation of English. Which brings us to the Spanish word for speaking: hablar. Thus Russian govar- probably comes from the same ancient root as Spanish hablar.
Spoken Russian is accessible because it’s delivered with crystalline clarity. Likewise Italian: unless it’s an extreme form of Mafioso underworld slang, I can follow most film dialogue. French however leaves me grasping at the subtitles. The French speak so fast, so many letters left unpronounced, so many homonyms, eg: la/ là/ las (the/there/exhausted), cent/ sans/ s’en/ sang (hundred/without/out of it/blood), foi/ foie/ fois (faith/liver/occasion).
One tongue in which I had great and repeated triumphs is Finnish. And it took just one word. Being part of the Finno-Ugaritic group, not Indo-European, it has no connection withother Western languages except neighbouring Estonian. Scholars discern faint echoes in Hungarian and some structural kinship with Turkish. I used to do business in Helsinki. By dint of much practice and calling upon my thespian experience, I managed to spit out a passable version of “Uomenta (Good morning)”. My clients were delighted to meet an Englishman who spoke Finnish even after I confessed it was the only word I knew.
With Basque I remain not even at beginner level but at absolute zero. Euskadi, as it calls itself, is an outlier, bearing no relation to any other language at all. According to scholarly analysis of its vocabulary it’s been around that corner of the world since the Stone Age. As a youngster hitchhiking around Spain, I was picked up by two kindly Basque lorry drivers. Hearing them chat away, I asked them to teach me a few words of Basque:
Me: “What is the word for road?”
Them: “Errepidea”
Me: “Errepidea”
Them: “No! No!”
My mouthings came nowhere near. After four or five similar attempts I realised it was impenetrable.
Do I feel different when speaking another tongue? Yes. Do I have different personalities in French or German? I don’t think so. Speaking a foreign language, any foreign language, brings out my improvising, sociable aspect. What used to be called “Hail fellow, well met”. My utterance is less accurate, precise, informed, than when I’m speaking English. I go with the flow, wherever my limitations in the language allow.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was proposed back in the last century, the idea being that each language contains an implicit worldview, that it constrains our way of thinking along specific pathways. The debate often descended to the matter of Eskimos and their words for snow. Twenty? Fifty? It was a matter of heated discussion and no doubt some frosty silences among linguistic academics. Beyond lie the questions, “What exactly is a word? Or a root word? Or a variant?” And more fundamental still, “What difference does it make?” Does the long vocabulary list for Arctic snowflakes mean the Eskimos construct the world in a different way from those in warmer climes or is this fertility a result of all those driving blizzards? I favour the latter view and it seems to be edging ahead among those with tenure for tongues. It’s because snow is omnipresent in their lives that Eskimos think and behave differently from the Masai, the Māori or the Mancunians.
Look closer to home at the Anglo-Saxons (as the French, rather oddly, refer to the US and UK together). Famously, we are “two nations divided by a common language”. The differences between Brit-speak and Yank-speak are probably no greater than those within these islands or between Texans and New- Yorkers. The differences in worldview, in underlying assumptions, in the rhythm of life on either side of the Pond are, I would say, substantial. They are not the result of going to the toilet or the restroom, of saying He’s fallen on the pavement or He fell on the sidewalk. They come from things like the size of the country with or without differences in time-zones and climate, whether slavery was an integral part of society or just trade at a distance, whether the majority descend from immigrants millennia ago or merely a few generations back. Many more real-world factors come to mind; these are what shape how people think, feel, relate to one another.
What about sex? In English at least, the word has undergone something of a sea change in my lifetime, with many people wanting to replace it with gender. I don’t have space here to engage in the debate between biology and grammar but would point to a curious difference of approach between speakers of German and of English. The social position of women and attitudes towards them have changed throughout the West. This side of the North Sea, we have dropped any feminised forms for professions and roles; they are now seen as demeaning. Thus actor not actress, manager not manageress, steward not stewardess. This change is deemed to be neutral, respectful, equalising. In the German-speaking world this same search for equality has taken language the other way. Tune in to German radio and you’ll be warmly greeted with “Liebe Zuhörer und Zuhörerinnen” (Dear listeners and listeneresses). Read an article about research by scientists, it’ll tell you of the progress made by Naturwissenschaftler und Naturwissenschaftlerinnen. At six syllables the base masculine form is long enough, add one for the feminine, add two for its plural; having to use both together, you end up with fifteen. Quite takes your breath away. The position of women is similar in the two countries. An indicator: the percentage of women in the UK’s House of Commons and the Bundestag is identical: 35%. But the languages have taken opposite paths. Society has changed; language has changed to reflect that, but in two different ways. Social change is clearly the cause, not the effect.
When a foreign word - kitsch, zeitgeist, boutique, café – enters the language, it does not create the thing described. It simply provides a convenient handle for the thing which may well have existed before. George W. Bush, annoyed that the French wouldn’t join in his invasion of Iraq, tried to purge American speech of French accretions: French fries should be renamed freedom fries. He also revealed his wide-ranging scholarship by suggesting that the reason the French were so weak and pathetic was “they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.”
Spanish has only one word, consciencia, to cover both conscience and consciousness; other Latinate languages are in the same boat. This may create difficulties for theologians and philosophers, but the rest of the population manage perfectly well.
A quark is a subatomic particle, discovered in 1964 and named after a near-nonsense line in a James Joyce novel. The particle didn’t come into existence because it got a name. It’s been around since the birth of the universe and will still be there long after language, humanity and the Earth itself have disappeared.
“The Greeks had a word for it”. Ancient Greek, that is, had a very extensive vocabulary with terms for thoughts which would take half a sentence to express in English. Examples abound. Here are a couple from Aristotle writing on tragic drama:
Hamartia - a fatal flaw which leads to the protagonist’s downfall;
Peripetaia - a sudden reversal of fortune leading to disaster.
But one word, xenos, still current today, combines two concepts which would call for a pair in most other languages. It’s at the root of the English xenophobia - fear of foreigners. Xenos means both stranger and guest. This reveals a strand in traditional Hellenic life: a stranger would always be made welcome. Only with the overwhelming mass tourism of the modern era has it begun to erode. It’s at the heart of one of my favourite Greek myths: the tale of Baucis and Philemon.
They lived in a remote village, ageing and penniless but still much in love. Two gods, Zeus and Hermes, were travelling the area in human form. The old couple, without recognising them, made them warmly welcome. On departure the gods revealed themselves and, by way of thanks, offered to grant any wish the two might have. All they asked for was to die together, so that neither would have to mourn alone. Their wish granted, they were turned to intertwining trees, an oak and a linden, and flourished on the mountainside. As we plod on through our senior years, my wife and I might well see the wisdom of their choice.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder -The Tower of Babel
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