I recently did a count, and I've studied ten languages during my life. There's something about wrapping my tongue around unfamiliar sibilants and alveolars that keeps luring me back into introductory language classes. I've been fascinated with the 'dark l' of Gaelic, the reflexive constructions of German, and most recently the fact that 'aime', 'aimes' and 'aiment' are pronounced identically in French.
I rarely get past beginners' level, and I sometimes wonder what the point is. I wonder if it has to do with growing up speaking a small language and feeling keen to reach out to other languages: we are here, we're not English but we exist in our comfortable cocoons, happy to stay huddled in but sharing a shy smile whenever our eyes and tongues meet -
kiitos ja hei. I wonder if it's militant multilingualism; I certainly used to harbour dreams of defending Gaelic from being worn down like old smokers' teeth on pipes made of clay.
But languages aren't ours to protect, to police, to deepfreeze. Lately I have been falling in love with internet English. I shows what a vibrant organism language is. A 'zomg n00b' can carry a tone, a register, a sense of us versus them - or nothing. I am merely dabbling in it, but it's been a pleasant dip into a new language.
I am very much a library linguist, but there are moments when the world pummels in and reminds me there is more to languages than phonetics and syntax trees. One such moment was in Greece last summer. I hiked for hours to reach a monastery on a mountain, only to find the hustle and bustle of a few busloads worth of tourists. I joined everyone else, and queued to buy a CD of hymns sung by the local monks. The sales clerk told me in Greek, in a rather resigned manner, that the songs were for a particular service. I nodded and mostly pretended to understand. He asked me where I was from; I told him. His eyes lit up from just that one word showing I had understood. He started asking me if there were many Orthodox people in my home country. I managed to stutter out in Greek that can't have sounded anything short of barbaric that there weren't many but some. He latched onto my arms and said, 'Κατάλαβες!', 'You understood!' And for just a brief moment we were out of our snail shells, me teetering in my 80's style skirt required by the monastery's dress code, him reaching out until his Greek was stretched into baby talk. It was an awkward lean, but we made it, and just for a moment the tips of our fingers touched.
Yes, I understood.
