The other day, a long-time family friend remarked that, “the more languages you know, the more people you can become.”
He spoke that sentence after Alan and I revealed that we are in a Latin study group and, sadly (for now anyway), we are not very successful in our comprehension of anything.
Having attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through high school, I felt confident to pick up where we left off some 50+ years ago. Masses were mostly in Latin then, and the language was required at school too.
It stunned to be so wrong. I couldn’t recall conjugations or declensions or even the rules for pronouns. I also wondered how I could be a different person if I understood Latin.
I thought of my experience as a Hungarian immigrant in the 1950’s when I spoke little to no English. That little girl was very shy and introverted. She was also self-conscious and reluctant to make friends.
Language broke that barrier eventually, though not without a multitude of slips and faux pas along the way. One of the challenges of life at the beginning stages of learning a new language is understanding idioms.
In kindergarten, a couple of little girls asked if I wanted to play “dress up” with them. I was happy to be over the “Hail Mary, Full of Grapes” fiasco earlier in the year and was eager to play.
Little did I know that the girls didn’t mean literally “dress UP.” I hiked my skirt to my waist and immediately caught the eye of one of the nuns supervising us on the playground. My punishment was to stand facing the convent wall while the other children played.
I did not know the word “humiliation” yet, but I certainly felt it and remember the tears.
I’m not sure how language made me different in Korea when I was in the Peace Corps in the 1970’s either. Again, what I recall most were the myriads of misunderstandings, including the horror of accidentally calling my boarding room a word that meant male private areas.
It also caused me not to realize that my co-teacher gave me dog soup for lunch one day. Ay caramba! Are you disgusted yet? Join the club.
What these linguistic improprieties taught me was that language can be beautiful and it can also be slippery. I also learned that language is fluid and words and phrases can depend upon the situation and the audience with whom one is talking.
So what if my husband used to say “bobbed wire” like many people from Oklahoma did when he was growing up? So what that I had to use the phrase “private areas” in this essay? Know your audience!
I recently learned from a friend that some people whose grown children live apart from them do not like the term “empty nesters.” She explained that it is more that their identities are now gone and they have not yet found a niche as a non-parent. To them, the phrase “empty nesters” diminishes this experience. Good to know. I will be more careful in the future.
I read a quote by a resident of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) who said that the capital, Abu Dhabi, felt like the geography of nowhere.
What an extreme statement! There are more nationalities and languages there than many places in the world. Do the people who speak several of the languages feel different? What words and phrases do they have to avoid? What systems of honorifics, if any, must they use?
Like Korean, Hungarian has a hierarchical level of politeness, in which one should not use a casual form of addressing or speaking to a person who is on a higher level from the speaker.
It is more complicated than the “T” (intimate for “you”) and “V” (formal for “you”) system used in French, Spanish, German and other languages.
Thinking of all the components of language — its time, place, manner, audience — can be overwhelming.
But, returning to the beginning of this piece, Latin, if there is one phrase I remember from childhood and is relevant now, it is Via Crucis, The Way of the Cross, which we know is a benchmark for Good Friday and the introspection and devotion it inspires.
That may a good start to examine who we are and what kind of people we would like to be as the years unfold, no matter the language.
This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Language is not like riding a bicycle | OPINION
Reporting by By Andrea Elise, Special to the Amarillo Globe-News / Amarillo Globe-News
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