Meanderings: December 18, 1999

Saturday,
December 18, 1999

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Hey, I just realized something -- I'm multi-lingual. How the hell did that happen?

Okay, that's a stupid question -- it's called "marrying a TSB contractor and moving countries every two years." But seriously, it's not something I've ever really thought about in reference to myself before. Smart, yes. Funny, you bet. Weird -- hey, was there ever a doubt?

But multi-lingual? Me? I mean, aren't I an American, one of the great masses who figure, "Hey, we already speak the lingua franca -- why bother learning anything else?"

I think it snuck up on me when I wasn't watching. And I blame it all on David Plesic, my Latin teacher in high school (yes, I took Latin in a Chicago public high school. It surprised me, too, but it came down to a choice between Latin and getting a teacher who was too hip for the room, or Spanish, which was taught by a very nice guy but just seemed so damned pedestrian. I mean, I learned how to count to twenty in Spanish on Sesame Street -- what else did I need to know?). Between rap sessions, showing us artifacts he'd gathered on his trips to Rome, and reclining in his chair like the reincarnation of Nero, complete with a crown of laurel leaves, he managed to drill basic Latin grammar into my head over two years. Can I read Latin now? No, but I still remember the different tenses (amo, amas, amat. . .) and gender endings, and I can puzzle out simple sentences if you give me a dictionary.

More importantly, I gained a paradigm for language acquisition -- sorry, lapsed into English majorhood there. What I mean is, I learned how to learn languages. They didn't come easily by any means (they still don't -- I wind up gaining fluency just as we're leaving the country), but I had a framework set up in my head that would process the new grammar and vocabulary without too much gnashing of teeth.

So, first there was Latin, the basis for all the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian). Then I developed that major crush on a guy in college which spurred me to learn German because he spoke it and was very proud of his Prussian ancestry (the same crush also caused me to dislocate my right knee and break the kneecap, but that's a whole 'nother story). Then I married Lyndon and moved to Montreal, which meant learning Quebecois French (I differentiate this from Parisian French because if you try to speak Quebecois French in France, they look at you like you've just whoopsed on their shoes. The Quebecois, on the other hand, think Parisian French is artificially stilted and believe they speak la verité Francais. An ocean between them, and they still can't get along -- thus, the French).

Then we moved to Holland, and I was so disgusted at the entire Dutch banking system and being stuck in the middle of farm country that I didn't learn much more than how to ask for 300 grams of turkey breast and a sliced white loaf. After that, Sweden, and my boss sent me to Swedish classes so that I could converse with Swedish programmers and ask them how the hell a new function worked and why they didn't tell me about it before I released the user guide..

So that's Latin, German, French, Dutch and Swedish in total. I'm probably most fluent in Swedish at the moment because I use it all the time, but I could bring my German up to full fluency any time with a couple of weeks in Germany (I still tend to conflate German with Swedish, though -- we were in Aachen last year on business, and a woman came up to me and asked me in German if I knew where a certain street was. I tried to say, "Ich bin traurig, aber ich wei§ nicht," which means Sorry, I don't know. What came out was, "Forlat, jag vet nicht," which earned me a strange look. I lapsed back into English and explained I was a tourist, ha ha. The strange look intensified, and she hurried away from the babbling American). French, I can read and speak if I do it slowly. Dutch, I can shop in, and I already explained about Latin. Oh, yeah, and I picked up a little Russian during a Short Term course at Illinois Wesleyan. And then there's the smattering of Yiddish, and I can swear in Spanish as well as count to 20.

Not bad for an American -- now if I could only figure how to understand Lyndon's Uncle Nobby. Believe me, Basque has nothing on a broad Yorkshire dialect.

With reference to those Mighty, Mighty WebRats:

Marti (aka Undergrad Par Excellence) really is excellent -- she's now been accepted into the Presidential Honors program, which takes care of her tuition and books. Good for you, girl!

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